


Nesting: Flashback #1

by babybasschick96



Series: Nesting [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Justice League - All Media Types, Teen Titans - All Media Types
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Background Dinah Lance/Oliver Queen - Freeform, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-08
Updated: 2016-12-21
Packaged: 2018-09-07 05:50:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8785576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babybasschick96/pseuds/babybasschick96
Summary: A brief look into the past of the "Nesting" universe.





	1. Chapter One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Or as I like to refer to it, Tim has a really bad day.  
> As previously mentioned, this next part to Nesting is a flashback. On top of allowing me to dive into the various relationships some more and explore the mythos quite a bit, writing this also gave me the opportunity to bridge the gaps between the “old” and the “new” and expand the universe out to include more of the DC Community.  
> This part takes place about three years before Part One, and the world looks a tad bit different. As I’ve planned it, this flashback has four parts (and I don’t really see that changing). I have upgraded the rating of this part to “mature” due to some language, but I promise it is not excessive, and I think the situations more than warrant the uses of such words. Things get a little…complicated and they are thrown out in the middle of battle or times of great physical or emotional stress. The change in rating is more of a way of me pointing out that my vocabulary has changed a little bit in comparison to what I used when I originally wrote Part One.  
> I will add more character tags as we go along and more characters become prevalent to the story, but for the moment, I kind of want to keep you guessing :)  
> As always, thank you for taking the time to read, and let me know what you think!

To say that things were going badly was a bit of an understatement. Cassie had a cut across her cheek; Bart was favoring a recently-relocated shoulder (which had been dislocated about two hours into the fight when he’d just given up all hope and body slammed one of the things); Tim had been electrocuted by his own staff about six times; and he wasn’t even sure how long it had been since the last time Damian had made some kind of derisive comment.

Things had eased up a little bit since the Justice League had shown up, but even still, they were kind of at their wit’s end about what to do, and not for the first time in the last thirteen months, Tim just wished that Kon was there so he could punch whatever was causing them so many issues in the face and they could all get on with their days.

That wasn’t going to happen, though, and Tim crammed the thought (and it’s accompanying wave of emotions) to the back of his mind and focused on the task at hand, because if they didn’t take this robot/alien/thing and it’s little cronies down soon, it was going to make it’s way to a civilized area and start doing some real damage. Tim scanned the clearing once again, all tall grass cutting up through the sand and the rocks underneath, and suddenly he had a plan.

“Red Robin to Batman; I repeat: Red Robin to Batman. Come in Batman?” he flicked the button on his comms unit before he started speaking and was greeted with a grunt and mild swearing for a moment from the other side as he watched said Batman swoop down out of Clark’s hands and struggle to take out one of the many canons that the robot thing had been firing at them.

“Yeah?” Tim got an actual (albeit agitated) answer about the same time that Bruce swore and ducked down to avoid getting hit by one of Ollie’s exploding arrows. “What the hell, Green!? Be careful!”

“Sorry,” Ollie apologized as he let another arrow fly, but he didn’t really sound like he meant it. “Didn’t see you.”

Bruce gave another grunt as he managed to pry open the protective covering of the canon—pulling a batarang of some sort out of his belt, and slamming it down into the compartment underneath, “What do you need, Red?”

“You think Superman’s strong enough to rip some of the metal off of that thing?”

“Depends on how much,” Bruce answered back, a little breathless, and Tim watched as he slid off the robot’s arm and twisted in mid-air as the ground approached, and flinched only the slightest bit when Clark swooped in to catch him before he became road kill. …Or would it be grass kill? “Why?”

“Because I need inside,” Tim tightened his grip on the staff in his hand, and prepared for the refusal he knew he was about to get.

“What?” Cassie was the first one to hiss. “Absolutely not—“

“Robin, it’s a giant alien-thing there’s no way—“

“Have you completely lost your mind—“

“We have no way of knowing what’s in—“

“Why?” surprisingly enough, it was Damian’s voice that cut all of the others off, and Tim sent him a silent thank you from across the battlefield and made a mental note to buy the kid some ice cream or something when they got back to Gotham.

“It’s softer on the inside—all of this thing’s defense mechanisms are focused on keeping things out, and based on how easily B just blew up that canon and the way it’s smoking now, it’s internal defenses aren’t very good. It’s soft and pliable inside to help improve mobility, and doesn’t have any kind of an ‘immune’ system to flush foreign bodies out of it’s system—at least not a good one. If Superman and Wonder Girl can get me inside while the rest of you distract it, I should be able to take it down in a matter of minutes.”

“That’s…that’s actually not a bad plan kid,” Ollie was the first one to break through the following silence, and Tim couldn’t help but take a deep breath of relief.

“It’s a dangerous one,” Bruce was quick to growl, but Tim could hear the contemplation in his voice underneath of it, and apparently he wasn’t the only one.

“Batman—Green Arrow, you can’t possibly be thinking about-–“

“Silence,” Diana was quick to reprimand her protégée from where the two of them were currently trying to keep control over one of the robot’s various guns with their lassos. “I know you’re concerned, Wonder Girl—but they know the risks. Focus on your part, for now. Leave the planning to them.”

Cassie didn’t take very well to that, Tim could see her scowl from one hundred yards away, but she didn’t argue and seemed to just channel her newfound anger into trying to control the beast. She’d been quite protective of all of them since she’d come back from the dead, and it kind of made Tim proud that her concern extended to him.

“Red Robin, are you sure you’ve thought this through?” Bruce asked over the comms and Tim didn’t resist the urge to sigh. “Nightwing and the Outlaws are on their way—“

“Yes, B, I’ve thought this through,” he didn’t snap at Bruce, and he tried his best to sound as calm, cool, and calculating as possible because he knew that if Bruce thought this decision was being based even remotely off of anything other than pure logic, Bruce wouldn’t give in. As if to prove his point, Tim jumped up out of his hiding spot and took out a mini robot with three swipes of his staff. “We’re throwing all we’ve got at it, and it’s only a matter of time before it remembers it has rockets strapped on to it’s legs and takes off for God knows where. We aren’t making any headway with this thing, and this is a surefire way to get him to stop. It’s worth the risk.”

There was silence over the comms, save for the grunts and battle cries (and occasional screams of pain) of the team as they continued to engage the robot, before Bruce came over the line again, “Kal-El, there’s a structural soft spot on the back of it’s right thigh. Do you think you can rip it open?”

“…I’m not sure,” Clark’s answer was hesitant, and Tim could see him hunched down beside Batman a little ways away, both of them eyeing the robot critically and wearily. “All of the fastenings are too high grade for me to break, but the metal sheeting itself is some of the weakest on the entire thing…”

“Wonder Girl?”

“If it gets the fight over faster so I can kill Red Robin myself, I’m in,” her answer was sharp and instant, and Tim couldn’t help but smile (even though he knew she was being completely serious).

“…Alright,” it was Bruce who made the final decision, and Tim was perfectly okay with that. “Move out.”

And just like that, everybody moved in synch to follow through with the new plan, even with as vague as it was, and Tim could see Garfield morph into a T-Rex to help aid Diana as Cassie released her grip on her whip and flied around to wait for Clark at the back of the robot’s leg. Tim dived back into the battlefield with a single-minded determination that had been known to scare more than one person, and picked his way across the blood and metal covered terrain through the little robots and the falling debris from where Arrow, J’onn, Bruce, and Barry were trying to distract the big robot from doing…well, pretty much anything it was trying to do.

Clark got caught up on his way over. He’d picked Bruce up again as he’d taken off and dropped him on another one of the robot’s guns, and had gotten the robot’s attention for his troubles. Tim hadn’t been able to keep up with the entire fight between the two as he engaged countless of the thing’s little…offspring, but Clark looked worse for the wear when the two finally came face to face at the foot of the robot, and Tim didn’t think it was possible, but it actually looked like Clark’s nose was bleeding.

“You good?” Tim called up at him as he knocked a robot’s head off with a batarang, and for a second, it almost felt like he had Kon back again, fighting side by side (or well, head to foot) with him—if only Clark had been in jeans and a t-shirt instead of his blue and red regalia, and about seventy-five pounds lighter.

“Yeah,” Clark called back, spinning in the air and throwing the robots that had managed to cling onto him out to sea. “Wonder Girl?”

“I’m ready,” she answered, fending off robots of her own.

“Alright, let’s do this then.”

“I’ll cover you,” Tim offered, and the metas grunted their agreement as they took off. Tim’s consciousness split between focusing on taking out the (relatively) tiny robots surrounding him and keeping an eye on what was going on above him. Clark and Cassie took a moment to survey the robot before they seemed to find a spot they found suitable and moved into position to start pulling. Clark made a couple of quick cuts with his laser vision, but they’d barely made half-inch dents in the thing earlier, so Tim honestly wasn’t sure how much it would help. Thankfully, the smaller robots went down fairly easily, there were just _so many_ of them. No matter where Tim turned, there were more of them, beeping and booping and doing everything from waving sharp pointy bits manically to firing some form of lasers at random and—

“Nightwing to Red Robin, Nightwing to Red Robin, do you copy?” static suddenly cut through Tim’s periphery, and he spared a second to reach up and switch on his mouthpiece again.

“Yeah,” Tim grunted, taking another electrocution from his own staff to his ribs before he slammed his elbow up into the robot that was attacking him and sent it to the ground just as he started to finally hear metal creak above him. “I copy.”

“Red?” Dick asked again, and this time the business in his tone was gone, and it was pure elder brother concern and Tim wanted to roll his eyes and groan. He loved Dick’s overprotectiveness—lived for it even, under the right circumstances—but it was so not the time. “Are you okay? Is something wrong? Are you—“

“I’m fine, ‘Wing,” Tim cut him off, grunting as another robot got in a lucky hit to his leg before Tim could more or less decapitate it. “Just a little busy. Is there something I can do for you?”

“Oh, no,” Dick answered, voice sweet and completely distracted, and Tim could see him shaking his head and cocking his hip to the side as they changed the subject—probably running a hand through Jason’s hair while Jason flew their plane and Roy glared in the background. “I just wanted to call and check in. We’re about forty minutes out, but—huh? What’s that, Hood? I don’t think so…I—“

“ _Dick_ ,” Tim hissed, and it was only partially because Dick was babbling.

“Did you guys call in any other back up without telling us?” Jason’s voice was _all_ business as it cut over the line overtop of Dick’s, and that was never a good thing.

“No,” Tim’s answer was immediate, but he didn’t have time to think much on the question because the robots just kept coming and why weren’t Cassie and Clark done yet? “Everybody else is busy.”

“Oh…well, you might have a problem then,” once again it was Dick who spoke.

Great.

“And _why_ —holy fuck, you have teeth! get away from me! _get away from me!_ —is that?” Tim asked as he very ineloquently delivered ten quick blows to one of the little robots’ processing units, the last five of which hadn’t exactly been necessary, but Tim felt justified in delivering, because it had honest to goodness tried to bite him.

“Because according to our radar you have a flying object coming at you at around four-hundred miles an hour…”

“WHAT?” Tim yelled, spinning around and scanning the sky for any incoming vehicles and—there it was, due west, approaching faster and lower than should be possible. Except it was too small to be a vehicle. Without thinking, Tim reached up to switch channels on his comms unit as he turned back around to deal with more of those stupid robots. “Red Robin to Justice League, Red Robin to Justice League. Be advised there is an incoming flyer, due west. I repeat there is an incoming flyer, due west. Origin and affiliation are unknown and it is to be regarded with extreme caution until more information becomes known. We are unsure if it is friendly or foe.”

There was a smattering of reactions over the comms unit (and questions), but Tim ignored them all (missed somebody hissing his name) in favor of looking up towards Clark and Cassie, because he needed to be in the robot _now_ because there was no way in hell they could handle two of those things at once, if that was even what the incoming flyer was (with Tim’s luck, it was a government missile that had been sent to just blow all of them up), and they were pulling and tugging with all of their might, but they weren’t making any headway and—

Tim’s head snapped up so fast his neck cracked, and his heart stopped in its place, because a familiar type of energy was buzzing all around his body like it was smelling and touching and licking at him all at once—like each and every molecule of air was a tiny little dog that had been reunited with their master after far too long and were eager to make sure they were okay—and there, right _there!_ Above him and a little to the right was one Connor Kent in all of his glory, dressed for battle in his three-quarter length sleeve t-shirt and his big, dumb, combat boots as he got ahold of the metal beside Cassie and gave a tug of his own, throwing his back into it with a snarl, and Tim watched as the metal slowly began to give under their hands.

Tim didn’t want to believe it, every fiber of his being was telling him that he wasn’t really there, that this was just another one of Tim’s dreams and he would wake up in a couple of minutes in his room in the Manor or the Tower, and Kon was going to be dead again, but Tim would know that scent anywhere—knew it better than Bruce’s or Jason’s or even Dick’s—and no matter how real the dreams had ever seemed, nothing had ever come close to the real thing. And what he was smelling…what he was _feeling_ —those were the real things, and Tim couldn’t believe it. Tim didn’t _want_ to believe it, because he had no idea how to.

“ _Drake_!” a voice very close to Tim demanded his attention, and Tim wasn’t sure if it was the fact that somebody had called his name while he was in uniform, or the voice itself, but something about it grabbed Tim’s attention, and when Tim looked down and his gaze caught on something in complete contrast with the scene above him. The white spaces of Damian’s mask offered him comfort and solidarity, even if they didn’t completely understand what he was going through, and Tim held on to that like a lifeline as his mind tried to drown itself in his own misery—just like it had been for the last seventeen months. “Look at me! You have to focus!”

Damian hadn’t presented yet—he was still a year or two off from even beginning to come into his impending alpha-hood—but pieces of it were already starting to show through, and Tim had no doubt that he would be able to control crowds of even alphas with his voice alone one day.

“ _Please,_ Red Robin,” he begged, stiletto in his hand, and blood dripping from his temple and a gash in between his shoulder and his bicep. “Father needs me on the ground.”

And Tim saw what Damian was trying to do and happily ran with it—channeling all of the anger and confusion he felt into something usable, and focused it on the task at hand. Nobody scared Damian or made him bleed but Tim.

(And occasionally Jason and Killer Croc, but you know, Jason was Damian’s older brother, too, and Croc was Croc, and _everybody_ was terrified of him—even if only a little bit—and Damian had this _thing_ with the semi-reptilian. Always had.)

“I need a way to get up there,” was totally not what Tim meant to say, but it was what came out of his mouth, and thankfully Damian’s posture relaxed and he took a look around them and analyzed what they had at their disposal and Tim purposefully didn’t do the same.

“Up the side,” Robin declared after a second of studying, pointing off to his left towards the ground, and Tim trusted his judgment enough to follow the gesture, to see what he was talking about. “There are little notches and rivets all the way up that should provide sufficient hand and footholds for someone of your size.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” it wasn’t quite a scoff, but Damian cocked his hip to the side and shot Tim a “look”, and that told Tim enough about how he felt about the situation.

“Just checking.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Damian rolled his eyes under his domino, and everything was back to normal. “Are we done here—or do you need me to hold your hand and coach you all the way up?”

“Nah, I’m good,” Tim spared him a half grimace, turning to the side and delivering two quick hits with his bō staff to one of the robots that strayed too close to prove his point, before he turned back to Damian. “Get back to B’s side before he gets tired of all of this and just lets this thing blow us up.”

“Tt, imbecile,” Damian shot back at him, but it didn’t have near the amount of heat that it was supposed to, and Tim just gave him a two finger salute before he turned his eyes back down to the ground and made his way over to where Damian had pointed.

He met two robots on the way, but it wasn’t even eighty-five seconds later that he was already half way up the leg. The brat had been right (when wasn’t he?), there were plenty of nooks and crannies and giant bolts for him to hold on to as he climbed. Some of them were more of a stretch than others, especially the higher he got, but Tim had more experience climbing things than anybody could ever need (hello, being short and living in two different “houses” full of relative giants). The real problem was that some of the bolts had cracked when Conner and Clark and Cassie were ripping the robot apart, and it was only about another fifteen seconds or so before two of them broke under his feet and Tim was left hanging on by a loose cord he’d been using to keep his balance as he searched for something sturdier.

“Well, this isn’t good,” Tim sighed to himself as he dangled off the back leg of the robot and looked up longingly at the hole he was supposed to be infiltrating barely ten feet above him, and resisted the urge to bang his head on the metal of the robot. There was absolutely nothing between where he was and the hole for Tim to grab on to, no matter where Tim looked (Cassie and Clark _really_ could have thought that one through a little better, even for them) and the distance down to the next in-tact foot hold was too far for Tim to safely retreat without risking falling to the ground. And as if to make matters worse—

Tim looked over to his right just in time to make out the shape of an arrowhead before it embedded itself in the metal of the robot, and he swore as he was thrown away from the resulting explosion.

Oddly enough, the resounding thing in Tim’s head in the following seconds wasn’t the fact that he wasn’t fried to a crisp or the body that had wrapped around his and shielded him; instead, it was that he wasn’t the only person cussing.

“Oh, shit,” Oliver’s realization came over the comms unit in Tim’s ear as Tim was yanked away from the robot in the resulting explosion as a thick body rapped around and shielded him from the worst of the debris, and Tim would have rolled his eyes if he weren’t otherwise occupied.

“ _Arrow!_ ” Bruce’s resulting growl came next. “What the _fuck?_ Would it kill you to be more careful??”

“Sorry, B,” Oliver croaked and grunted as Tim assumed he dodged an attack from the bigger robot or engaged one of the smaller ones. “I didn’t see him and one of the robots knocked off my aim. Sorry, Red.”

“S’okay,” Tim slurred back, trying desperately to fight off the air-sickness that was suddenly overwhelming him as he realized he was still way too high off the ground (and actually, realized he wasn’t a mess of blood and bones on the ground, in general). “’Didn’t mean to.”

“Doesn’t make it right,” another deep voice grumbled and Tim cringed when he realized he felt the rumble more than heard it, even through his thick uniform. “You okay there, Rob?”

“S’not Rob anymore,” Tim huffed out, slowly starting to test his muscles in their Kryptonian cage to make sure that everything was still intact and working as he started to get his wits back about him. “It’s Red.”

“So, I’ve seen and heard,” Kon mused, and Tim didn’t even want to try to figure _that_ out. “Were you going somewhere when you decided to go careening through the air, or were you just climbing up the side of the scary murder robot for fun?”

“Oh, you know me—I was just hungry and wanted to see if that thing had a take out window on it somewhere for a donut or some fries or something…” Tim answered him with a sarcastic lightness to his voice before he turned in Kon’s arms to smack at his head and shoulders in annoyance. “Of course. I. Was going. Somewhere. You. Gigantic. Jerk Face.”

Kon laughed in response, big and booming and child-like, and let Tim squirm around in his arms for a moment, before he caught him with an arm around his shoulders and the other under the bend of his knees and forced him bodily to his chest in a bridal hold.

“You’ve gotten feistier since I left,” his wolfish grin was fond as he looked down at Tim.

“Yeah, well, put me down,” Tim did not pout as he crossed his arms over his chest and glared up at Kon’s sunny face, because that would have been childish, and Tim was above such things (especially when it came to gigantic jerk faces who were supposed to be dead, and _why was the universe torturing him like this??_ ). “I was in the middle of trying to do something and people’s lives depend on it.”

“Sure thing, Princess,” Kon grinned, and Tim resisted the urge to huff again in annoyance. “Just tell me where.”

“That giant hole you just helped to rip open.”

“What?” that got Kon’s attention, and his eyes opened almost comically wide as the humor and teasing drained from his features. “You mean you want to go inside that thing?”

“Yes,” Tim tried to remain patient, but it wasn’t working out very well. “That was the whole point of ripping it open in the first place.”

“No,” Kon shook his head, eyebrows furrowing as he geared up to start arguing with Tim, but then a voice broke over the comms unit again—

“RED!”

—And Tim instinctively pushed himself up and forced Kon’s upper body down, just in time for Clark to go soaring past where their heads had been just seconds before.

“Huh—wha…?” Kon sputtered for a moment, turning to watch as Clark hit the water and created a small tsunami, before he turned back to look at Tim with eyes wide for a completely different reason. “In the hole you said?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Tim answered him, and Kon held his gaze for a moment, searching his eyes behind the mask seriously, before he nodded his head and tightened his grip on Tim’s body as he swooped back down towards the robot.

“What can I do to help?”

“Distract it,” Tim answered, and tried to ignore how wonderful Kon’s broad shoulders felt under his arms as he held on to them to keep from falling. He’d noticed Kon drifting as they were talking earlier, slowly floating up and away from the scene in his excitement and distraction, but Tim hadn’t realized how far they’d gone until Kon literally had to fly them back towards the battlefield. “See if you can take out a couple more of its cannons and things from the outside. They’re the only weak spots we’ve been able to find, other than the spot where you guys ripped it open.”

“Got it,” Kon nodded his head, all humor gone as he reverted back to battle-mode, and a couple of seconds later Tim let go of his shoulders to slide down until Kon was just holding him by the wrists until the robot was close enough for Kon to let go completely. “See you on the other side.”

Just like that, Kon’s hands were gone and Tim was forever thankful for Bruce’s training because his body still managed to somersault mid air and guide him down through the hole even as his heart stopped and his mind slammed into what Tim was pretty sure was only a metaphorical wall.

Tim wasn’t sure why that phrase out of everything he and Kon had said back and forth had struck something inside of himself—maybe it was the fact that it implied that this wasn’t all some kind of hallucination and that Kon had intended to be there “on the other side” and that Tim was going to have to face him again—but it had, and Tim scrambled to get a hold of himself as he landed on a grated divider installed for what had to have been maintenance workers, a couple of feet below the hole.

The robot was big—not the biggest they’d ever fought, but definitely up there on the list—and Tim was lucky enough to have landed in what seemed to be a mostly empty compartment. All kinds of wires and circuit boards ran along the walls so it was a tight fit, but Tim had enough room to stand up comfortably so he would take it. Things would get tighter the higher Tim climbed and the structures became more and more complex and less and less just for support.

Still, Tim couldn’t stand up, couldn’t do anything for the hundreds of memories that were flashing in front of his eyes, and he hugged his knees to his chest as he gasped and raised a hand up to his comms unit to change his radio to a private frequency.

“Robin?” he choked out in a whisper, and a second later Damian’s voice came back over the line.

“Yeah?”

“I…I…” Tim tried to get the words out, but his mouth just wasn’t working, and neither was his brain for that matter, and they just weren’t coming and—

“Red?” Damian’s voice was soft, at least for him, and it helped to ground Tim, once again, as he synced his breaths up with Damian’s. “What do you need?”

“Talk to me?” was all Tim could force out around his panic attack, and Tim could practically hear Damian melt.

“Tt, you don’t need me to help you through this, Red,” Damian argued, but his words weren’t hostile like they once would have been. No, now they were just…fond. “But, yes. I’ll talk to you, if it helps.”

“Thank you,” Tim let out a sigh of relief, and Damian gave him a minute to collect his thoughts before Tim pushed himself up off of the platform and pulled a double-bladed batarang from his belt. “Now, let’s disable this son of a bitch so we can go home and order a pizza.”

“My thoughts exactly—also, Beast Boy is clearly a moron.”

So, the two kept at it, talking and snarking and complaining about the fight in general back and forth as Tim made his way up the robot and cut at any wiring and soft material he found.

He accidentally shocked himself a couple of times, but no worse than he had when fighting any other electricity-centered villain, and the effectiveness of his work was clear in the relaxing of Damian’s tone and the cheers of victory that came from their various teammates as they were finally able to get close enough to start landing some major hits the farther up the thing Tim worked.

“So, as I was saying, Amelia was sitting up on my dresser and Titus was laying underneath of her and—“

“Red Robin,” Damian was suddenly cut off by Bruce’s voice and static a couple of minutes later, and it took longer than Tim was willing to admit to realize that he’d overridden the controls on Tim’s equipment when Tim hadn’t answered him on the officially designated frequency for the mission.

“Yes?”

“Are you still alive?” Bruce’s question was somewhere between annoyed and amused, and Tim blushed under his mask.

“Uh, yeah—sorry. Just…a little overwhelmed.”

“Understandable,” Bruce responded back in a tone that matched the sentiment. Even if Bruce didn’t know the extent of it, he’d still been around when Kon died, and he’d seen first hand how strongly it had affected Tim. “I pulled Kryptonite on him after he landed. At the very least, he is partially Kryptonian, even if he isn’t Kon-El.”

“Don’t tell me that,” Tim shook his head, refusing to fall back down into the hole his mind kept trying to push him towards. “I need to focus.”

“…Alright, then,” Bruce agreed, after a couple of heartbeats of silence. “Status report?”

Yes, right, good. The mission. Tim took a look around him at all of the wires and catches and releases.

“I’ve climbed roughly thirty feet up the thing,” Tim assessed the area around him. “I’m somewhere in the abdominal cavity, as we speak. It’s a tight fit, but I’m managing. The wires are cutting almost scarily easy, but from the sound of it, it’s working.”

“It is,” Bruce confirmed, and started to say something more, but then one of Ollie’s arrows blasted another hole in the metal, about ten feet above Tim’s head, and Bruce swore as the robot started moving underneath of Tim’s feet and he dropped his batarang and grabbed on to the still intact wires for dear life.

“Batman!”

“Hang on, Red,” Bruce ordered him, and Tim could only imagine him switching his own comms unit back to the ‘public’ feed to yell at Ollie.

“Red?” Damian’s voice came back over the comms unit, undercutting Bruce giving Oliver the third degree.

“Yeah?” Tim answered back, making a mental note to himself to reprogram his earpiece so that it couldn’t be accessed remotely, even by the other Bats.

“Where are you?”

And in spite of everything, Tim sighed, “I’m up in this robot thing’s abdominal cavity. I _just_ told B—“

“Get out,” Damian cut him off, and if Tim could have furrowed his eyebrows at the younger man he would have. “Abandon mission.”

“I kind of can’t right now, Rob. I’m a little—“

“ _Red_ ,” the urgency in Damian’s tone increased and wasn’t that just weird? But then, Tim heard gears and things shifting somewhere below him down in the robot, and the smell of gasoline washed over Tim like a wild fire.

“…Shit.”

“Get out, _now_!”

“Um, kind of can’t,” Tim gave a nervous almost half laugh back as he looked around himself and tried to figure out how the hell he was going to get himself out of the robot alive. The shrapnel from Oliver’s arrow had him caged in, and there was nowhere down for him to go.

“ _What_?” it was Bruce this time and that didn’t really make Tim feel any better.

“I’m a little bit stuck—“

“ _Red_!”

“I know,” Tim flinched at the tone and turned as much as he could in his little hole.

“Hang on,” it was Damian, again—frantic, almost desperate. “I’ll be up there in—“

“NO!” both Tim and Bruce yelled in unison, and at least there was one thing they agreed on.

“Absolutely not,” Bruce added at the same time that Tim forced his breaths to stay calm and his brain to work through the panic. “Superman!”

“ _Robin_ ,” another voice cut through the haze, and if Tim had enough room to stand up straight and snap to attention he would have. “Where are you—“

“It doesn’t matter—“

“The hell it doesn’t—“

“Get out of here and save yourselves—“

“No!”

“You won’t get to me in time—“

“I’m not leaving without you—“

“ _Kon-el!_ ”

“ _Timothy—_ ”

And, there! There it was! One of the main processing units! Two feet over and about halfway up to the hole. Destroying it might not stop the robot completely, but it should at least slow it down and weaken it enough that one of the metas would be able to get inside to get to him.

How had he missed that up there?

It didn’t matter, though. Tim would sit down and figure that part out later. He just needed to figure out how he was going to get to it and disable it before the robot finished its pre-flight command sequence and blasted both of the two them up into outer space (or blew them up in the process).

Scanning his surroundings quickly, Tim mapped out the best course of action and started worming his way around in the little crevice he’d made for himself, and just a couple of strong shoves and one particularly long stretch there, and—

“Done,” Tim smiled to himself as he suctioned the last batarang into place instead of throwing it and let go of the cable he’d been using to hold himself up so he could slide back down into the robot as far as he could, hitting the detonator switch that was still in his hand as soon as his feet hit something solid and he could tuck himself down into a little ball.

The heat and the sound of the explosions were intense, but thankfully Tim’s aim was still as good as it had ever been, and both of the batarangs he’d thrown had ended up down the thing’s arm-like appendages, and not down below Tim to ignite the robot’s gas tanks like he’d been half afraid they would. It wasn’t exactly what Tim had in mind when he’d first brought the plan up to Bruce barely fifteen minutes before hand, but all in all he couldn’t really complain. The explosives were small discharges—big and strong enough to crack concrete but not much more impressive than that—but they did their jobs and tore through the cables and the circuit boards well. Tim wasn’t sure if he had managed to completely shut down the robot based on the lack of movement and the extent of the damage around him, but at the very least he’d set it into some sort of emergency-stasis, and Bruce and Vic would have a little bit of time to figure out what to do with it next.

Tim could hear the cries of victory from outside, as the fire and smoke cleared quickly (there wasn’t much inside other than cables to continue _to_ burn, and the gas tanks had remained intact) and he started pushing himself up out of his little ball to test the use of his limbs again.

“Red Robin?” Bruce’s voice was near a whisper when the programming on Tim’s comms unit finally switched back on and out of safe-mode.

“’M fine,” Tim answered as he fumbled to stand back up, knees and legs shaking underneath of him as he did so, and the relieved sigh that Bruce gave in return was both heart-warming and terrifying.

“The primary-threat and beta threats have been secured and eliminated,” Bruce confirmed after he’d taken a second to collect himself again. “Shutting down the master robot has seemed to incapacitate the smaller ones that accompanied it. Most of them stopped working before you’d even had the chance to detonate your explosives, but Wonder Woman and Cyborg are taking care of the ones that remained, now.”

“That’s good,” Tim nodded his head, even though Bruce couldn’t see him, giving a small grunt as his abdomen protested against supporting his body weight as he climbed up to the hole that Ollie had blown through right before Tim had blown everything up. “Status Report on the rest of the team?”

“Unknown at the moment. There seem to be no major injuries, but most everybody is still too high on adrenaline to trust their assessments.”

“As usual,” Tim hummed, and he wasn’t quite sure who was staying on the line to help the other, but it was working for both of them, so Tim just kept talking even as he pulled the top half of himself up and out of the hole so he could see what was going on around him on the ground…which was mostly Cassie shoving her tongue down a very surprised looking Kon’s throat so Tim immediately redirected his gaze out over the ocean instead. Yeah, that view was pretty. Tim wouldn’t have minded looking out at that for the rest of his life. “’Wing and the Outlaws?”

“About fifteen minutes late and going to get a stern talking to when they get here.”

“Well, better late than never,” Tim shrugged, far too tired to feel anything even remotely close to annoyance. There was silence over the comms unit for a moment, as Bruce had to disengage to answer a question from Ollie or J’onn, and for the first time in over a year, Tim was almost able to just take a deep breath and relax without having to worry about anything that was going on around him, and he was almost ready to just give in and let the wind blow over his face and ignore how horribly wrong his life was about to go, when the metal of the robot gave one of the loudest, most gut wrenchingly strong creaks Tim had ever heard, and his eyes snapped open as he realized what was happening.

“Red?” Damian’s voice cut over the line again, and Tim could only imagine what it looked like from the outside as the robot started to sway in the wind.

“Today’s just not my day, is it?”

“Hang on!” Damian completely ignored that Tim had said anything in the first place. “All of our flyers are occupied at the moment except—WONDER GIRL! WOULD YOU STOP YOUR INSUFFERABLE—what—no—how dare you—BATMAN!“

Tim didn’t know what was happening below him, but it was already too late.

“Batman,” the name was soft off of Tim’s lips, a prayer—a thank you, and before anything else could happen, an explosion went off on the back side of the robot, somewhere up near it’s ‘head’, and Tim was sighing as the robot finally tipped forward and the water rushed up to meet him.


	2. Chapter Two

“Ohmygod,Redareyouokay?” Bart was the first one out to him, but Ollie, Bruce, and Damian were hot on his heels.

“‘Fine,” Tim managed through the full body coughs and stutters, but still leaned into Bart’s offered side (the one without the shoulder problem) nonetheless. “Jus’ a little wet.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Bart snorted through a grin and Tim failed miserably at smiling back at him before Bruce and Damian were suddenly there, pulling at his limbs and putting their hands on his torso like they were trying to reassure themselves that he was still there.

“Red—what happened?”

“Are you okay?”

“Why didn’t you radio for help?”

“Whoa, easy, there,” Bart chanced laying a hand on Bruce’s shoulder, and didn’t pull it away when two heads turn to glare at him. “I know you want answers, and far it be from me to step in-between you and one of your babies, B, but Red here just about drowned—he might need a minute to get calmed down before you start interrogating him.”

Neither Bruce nor Damian looked too happy about it, but Bart had made a good point, so Bruce settled for standing back up and slipping Tim’s free arm around his shoulders to help support more than his fair share of Tim’s weight, “You’re right. Let’s get him out of the water.”

Really, they were just down in the tides, barely up to their thighs when the waves came crashing in, but Tim appreciated it nonetheless.

“How long was I under?”

“Five minutes and twenty-three seconds,” Damian answered him with a robotic edge to his voice that Tim knew wasn’t good.

“New personal record,” Tim hummed, as they finally broke free from the water completely, trying not to look over at the rambunctious group of teens (and not so teens anymore) not even a football field’s length away. “And not a single one of them noticed?”

Tim was mostly joking when he said it—it was pretty obvious that nobody had been paying that much attention, at least none of the younger superheroes—but he could tell by how much Bruce stiffened underneath of him that he had underestimated just how bad the lack of response was.

“…Clark did,” was what Bruce finally ground out as he and Bart eased Tim down onto a boulder to rest, and Tim couldn’t help but give a small smile at that. Regardless of how…tempestuous Bruce and Clark’s relationship could get at times because of the differences between the two of them, Clark still cared about him—about _all_ of them—and there was no way he would have lost track of one of them in the middle of a battle. The fact that he was too busy doing something else to interfere went unsaid, and Tim was perfectly okay with that. He’d gotten really good at looking out for himself over the last year or so (not that he couldn’t before), and he hadn’t minded doing it again. He just…would have preferred to not get wet in the process. “The lack of discipline your team has demonstrated today is absolutely appalling, Red Robin.”

Bruce was looking down at one of the information screens on his gauntlet as he spoke, so he didn’t see the way that Tim’s…everything fell in response, but he did notice the pinched strain of Tim’s face when he looked back up (and the disbelief on Bart, Ollie, and Damian’s), and realized after a second of confusion how Tim had taken what he’d said.

“Red—that’s not what I meant—“

“No, it’s okay,” Tim shook his head, rubbing at a sore spot on his arm as he looked anywhere he could but at Bruce—and that was a bad idea, too, because Diana was talking to Kon, and Cassie was still draped all over his arm, and Kon was smiling, and Tim just wanted to go back to the Manor and crawl into his bed and forget that it had all happened. “I got pretty lax with the rules when I was running things and it’s going to take some time for…the ones who are in charge now to correct that mistake. I understand that now.”

“Red…” Bruce obviously wanted to say something more—the uncharacteristic emotion clear in his voice as his hand hovered an inch or two above Tim’s knee—but Ollie placed a hand on his shoulder and Bruce took the silent suggestion for him to let it go for the time being.

“Sorry, for making you take a swim there, Robin,” Ollie grimaced sympathetically as he changed the subject and leaned over Bruce’s side to get a little closer to the young man. “But I was hoping the water might provide a little bit of a softer landing than the ground would.”

“It did,” Tim gave a small little half smile up at him even as he accepted a drink of fresh water out of the cylindrical canteen Bart offered him. Salt clung to his skin and still burned at his nose, but the cool liquid helped. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Ollie smiled back. “Consider it compensation for that botched shot earlier.”

“Deal,” Tim gave a real grin this time as Bruce snorted and rolled his eyes, and Ollie returned it before he squeezed Bruce’s shoulder as he stood back up. Bruce reached up to squeeze his hand in response—some silent communication passing between the two of them that Tim didn’t take the time to interpret—before Ollie let go and made his way over to where Black Canary and Captain Atom had come to wait for him a little ways away.

“How are you feeling?” Bruce asked when Tim looked back to him, and Bart took the canteen away from him and recapped it.

“A little better,” Tim answered him, and it wasn’t a complete lie because Tim _did_ feel better. The worst of the water had drained from his gloves and the temperature regulation systems in his suit were back on line. (Never mind the fact that he was so sick to his stomach that he was pretty sure he was about thirty seconds away from jumping back into the water to just make it go away.) “Thanks for saving me out there.”

“Tt—we didn’t save you,” Damian scoffed from where he was standing out to Tim and Bruce’s other side, arms crossed over his chest as he glared out at the group of teenagers and adults surrounding Conner and Cassie. “You saved yourself.”

“That’s very true,” Bruce hummed with an impressed look on his face as he watched his youngest before he turned back to Tim. “We had nothing to do with keeping you alive. But…you’re welcome, Red. We’re here for you.”

“I know,” Tim gave him a wane smile, and the one Bruce gave in return wasn’t much better, but he reached out to squeeze Tim’s knee, and that said a lot more than Bruce’s words ever could.

“Batman,” Superman’s voice suddenly resonated from behind Tim and it was only the body languages of those around him that kept Tim from jumping out of his skin at the realization that there was somebody behind him.

“Yes?” Bruce didn’t snap to attention, but he did straighten his shoulders and flex his abs to pull his chest down and out as he raised his chin in response.

“I hate to pull you away from one of your Robins, but we need your help.”

“What is it?” Bruce gruffed.

“The…ship is mostly shut down, but one of its computers is still functioning. As far as we can tell, it’s not transmitting, but it _is_ still recording data, and we’re not sure how long it will take before it starts transmitting again—or worse.”

“Can you destroy it?” Bruce did snap this time—it was just into a protective and defensive gesture instead of one of merely quizzical intent.

“’Manhunter can,” Clark answered him with a nod of his head, but all parties could tell by the set of his jaw that neither one of them were certain it would work. “But Cyborg wanted you to take a look at it first, to make sure he hasn’t missed something that could activate some kind of an emergency-data emission or self-destruct failsafe—especially considering the circumstances.”

“Understood,” Bruce nodded his head once, and Clark took it as the go-ahead that it was, and only hesitated long enough to reach down and lay a reassuring hand on Tim’s shoulder (which Tim leaned up into gratefully), before he flew over all of their heads and circled around to brace Bruce underneath of his arms. “Are you going to be okay until I get back, Red?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Tim nodded his head, trying to brush off Bruce’s concern. “It was just a little salt water and some exploding arrows. I mean—who hasn’t been blown into the water by an arrow around here before?”

Tim tried to laugh, but it came out more a cough than anything else, and Bruce just stared back at him, completely un-amused, until Tim stopped trying, and pushed himself up from the rock.

“Really, B,” he tried again, refusing Bart’s help as he swayed until he could stand up straight on his own. “I’m fine. Go with Superman and checkout the computer, and I’ll come join you once I get my feet back under me.”

“Okay,” Bruce agreed with a slow nod of his head after watching Tim for a moment, before turning to Damian. “I want a perimeter check. So far we have no evidence that the clone isn’t who he says he is, and Wonder Woman and Cyborg think they have all of the robots taken care of, but the timing of this seems a little odd to me—I don’t like it. Take a look around and make sure there isn’t something going on that we can’t see.”

“Yes, sir,” Damian answered him tentatively, but Tim could tell he wasn’t happy about it by the way he hesitated and looked over at him. Bruce seemed to pick up on it to. “But, I really don’t think—“

“Kid Flash will stay with Red Robin until one of the two of us are done.”

“Understood,” Robin nodded his head, seemingly much happier with that course of events than whatever he had been expecting Bruce to say, and turned to do as he’d been told, stopping just long enough to reach up and squeeze Tim’s bicep much like Clark had squeezed Tim’s shoulder, before he walked away, swinging his katana through the air and whistling as he went.

“Kid Flash—“

“I’m on it,” Bart reassured Bruce before he could even finish, waving a hand in his direction as he did so without turning away from Tim.

“…Thank you,” Bruce smiled, once he had recovered from the shock. It wasn’t often that Bruce was interrupted (even keeping company with the crowd he found himself surrounded by most of the time), and it seemed as though he still hadn’t adjusted to the youngest speedster’s carefree attitude, even if he had been a friend of Tim’s for years.

“Sure, sure,” Bart spared him a glance and a shrug, and Bruce laughed—he actually _laughed_ —before he nodded his head and signaled for Clark to lift both of the two of them up into the air, only to give him another signal to stop once Bruce was only a foot or two off of the ground.

“You sure you’re going to be okay, Red?” he asked again, his eyebrows obviously furrowed in concern underneath of the cowl.

“Yeah,” Tim nodded his head, feeling a fraction lighter due to—if not bewildered by—what was going on around him. “I think I’m in good hands.”

“Copy that,” Bruce agreed, sparing Bart one last look before nodding for Clark to take off again—already barking questions and orders into his ear piece as he went.

“Is it sacrilege to say that I miss the other Batman?” Bart mused as he watched Bruce and Clark fly away.

“No,” Tim snorted, stumbling and reaching out to take Bart’s offered arm to steady himself as he did so. “But I wouldn’t let him hear you say that—or Hood. They might get a little jealous.”

“True,” Bart agreed with a grimace, reaching up to brace the small of Tim’s back as the shorter of the two of them faltered even more. “Are you sure you’re okay there, buddy? You seem a little unsteady on your feet.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Tim wasn’t nearly as patient with the waving off of Bart’s concern as he had been with Bruce’s. Tim was fine, he’d just…hit his pelvis and his groin funny when he’d landed in the water, and that was why he was having such a hard time standing. Yeah—that was what it was. “Just a little water-logged, and over the love-sick puppy routine.”

And that got Bart to snort, “You and me both, Red. You and me both.”

“Seriously, though, Impulse. I’m fine. You should go run the perimeter with Robin—“

“Sorry, no can do, hermano,” Bart shook his head. “Batman gave me an order, and despite what everybody else seems to think, I _don’t_ want to get on his bad side.”

“You’re not going to get on his bad side,” Tim rolled his eyes, gritting his teeth at the fresh wave of vertigo that wracked through his body. “He’s just being an overprotective asshole—“

“Well, that makes two of us,” a gratingly familiar voice rumbled from somewhere above them and off to the side, and Tim gripped onto Bart’s arm as he swayed under the new comer’s gaze and the sensation of the air rippling around him.

This time, unlike the first, Kon had all of the splendor and glory that a hero should have when they made their big-entrance, including the sweat soaked abs and glistening pectorals and shoulders that were mysteriously bare to the world, and the faded denim jeans that hung snugly on his hips and left little to the imagination, but the only thing that Tim could think about as he looked up to Kon’s sun-haloed face was how his stomach just turned that more with his latest well-wisher’s arrival.

“And, I mean, I know I died and all and that must have been hard for you guys, but don’t I at least get a hello or something? It’s not like we weren’t best friends for years or anything.”

“Superboy,” Bart’s face split into a wide grin regardless of the conflicting feelings flashing through his body language and he vibrated beside Tim with the force of his excitement at seeing the third member of their little trio back healthy and alive. Instinctively, he took a step forward, but then he froze and his eyes flicked back down to Tim, and Tim could see the uncertainty and concern swimming in their depths and he immediately a small nod of his head in approval. Bart hesitated for a second, holding back as long as his elation would let him, before his excitement won out and he leaped up into Kon’s arms with another smile on his face. “You’reback,you’realive,wethoughtyouweredeadwesawMatchkillyouhowareyouherewherehaveyoubeenIwouldhavebeenoversoonerbutRedheredecidedtotakeaswimandhowareyoualive?”

“Easy there, Impulse,” Kon chuckled, pretending to try to push the speedster away, but he obviously didn’t try very hard because Bart still had both his arms and his legs wrapped around Kon’s torso when Kon ‘gave in’ and returned the hug, and it warmed a small part of Tim’s heart to watch. “It’s nice to see you, too.”

“ _Superboy_ ,” Bart said his name again, squeezing with all of his might for a long second before he moved and dropped himself back down to his feet again. “You’re back.”

“Yeah,” Kon nodded his head, and Tim looked everywhere he could except at the pair until Kon turned his attention to him—Bart’s happy demeanor falling again as he took an unconscious, protective half-step in between them as he did so. “Sorry about the swim there, Rob. I tried to get over to you in time, but the team had me surrounded. You okay?”

“Yep, he’s good,” Bart nodded his head, answering for Tim.

“But has somehow lost his ability to speak in the last ten minutes or so?” Kon raised his eyebrows between the two of them.

Thankfully (or unthankfully, as it would turn out), Cassie called Bart’s name and diverted the conversation, but Tim froze as they both looked up to watch her beckoning him over with a wave of her hand.

“I’m not going,” Bart stated immediately, glaring across the field at Cassie and reaching up to latch on to Tim’s bicep as he did so.

Cassie didn’t seem to like that, and even from the distance between them, Tim could see her eyes narrow and her stance widen.

“Impulse—“

“No,” Bart cut Tim off firmly, looking back towards him. “I have my orders and I’m following them. If she has a problem with that, she can take it up with Batman and Superman—not to mention the rest of the League.”

“—Please,” Tim finished his sentence as if he had never been interrupted, and Bart deflated at the look on his face.

“But—“

“Go find out what she wants,” Tim soothed, fisting the still-soaked edge of his cape in his hand as he did so. “Things are bad enough as it is without her being mad at you, too, and I’m sure what ever it is won’t take you very long. Just get over there and get it done, and then come back over to me when you’re done. Batman can’t fault you for that. Besides, you’re the fastest man alive. If anything happens to me, you can be right back over in a—“

“Flash,” Bart finished Tim’s sentence with a roll of his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I got it… You sure you’re going to be alright?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” Tim reassured him again—feeling like it was the hundredth time he’d uttered those words in the last hour—before Bart nodded his head a little wearily and took off after Cassie and the rest of the team.

“Well, that was…weird,” Kon spoke up a minute or two later, looking back towards Tim as Tim still watched Bart converse with Cassie in the distance.

“Nah,” Tim shook his head a little, speaking quietly and dropping his cape in favor crossing his arms over his chest tightly to try to stop the increasingly violent tremors that were starting to rack his body. His eyes flicked up to briefly meet Kon’s during his next sentence before he looked back down at the ground with his last. “He’s just worried about me—that’s all. Things have been kind of rough the last couple of months, and he feels guilty for playing his part in it.”

“Bart did something to hurt you?” Tim could hear Kon’s eyebrows rise in surprise.

“Not intentionally—no,” Tim shook his head again, shifting his weight to try to ease the ever growing pain in his pelvis and lower back. “But yes, he did. A lot of people did, and I’m sorry if that’s making me seem a little unwelcoming at the moment. I’ve just grown quite weary of people since you’ve been gone.”

“Since I’ve been gone?” Kon snorted, and Tim had to work to not just punch him in the face and run away. “You’ve _always_ been weary of people, Rob—it didn’t just start after I went away or whatever—but come on, man. It’s _me_. You know I’d never hurt you—“

“Not intentionally, no,” Tim rolled his eyes, and had to stop for a minute to collect his thoughts and his balance as a particularly sharp pain traveled up his abdomen—feeling eerily similar to a cross between a punch and a cramp—and his vision went blurry for a moment. “But—but post traumatic st-tress has a funny way of sh-showing itself, and s-sometimes it’s hard for the subconscious to differentiate b-between—ow—“

“Um—hey, Rob?” Kon cut him off, lifting a couple of inches off the ground to hover over top of Tim, who had doubled over in pain. “Are you okay?”

“‘M fine,” Tim quite literally waved off Kon’s concern with the hand that wasn’t pressed into his stomach in a vain attempt to try to alleviate the pain. “Just hit the water a little f-funny earlier, and am having shockw-waves of pain as the adrenaline w-wears itself off. That’s it.”

“Really?” Kon didn’t sound convinced, as he continued to hover over Tim and run his TTK along Tim’s form as he tried to find injuries that he couldn’t see. “Because you don’t look okay to me. I—“

“What—no—clone— _don’t_!” Damian’s voice cut in from somewhere off to the side, but it was already too late. Kon’s hand was stretched out in front of himself, and Tim was swaying to the side. Before either one of them could stop it, Kon’s hand made contact with the side of Tim’s neck and Kon jerked about three feet back as Tim screamed in pain and fell to his knees on the ground.


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, so this is the other multi point of viewed chapter I was talking about, though this one was definitely intentional. I don’t want to say too much, because I don’t want to spoil anything or ruin the affect, but more or less medical emergencies are a very odd mix of chaos and complete and utter organization, and…well, I tried to capture that the best I could. There are lots of moving parts to this chapter, and I hope I’ve done a good job of balancing details with the panicked vibe I was going for, but feel free to ask questions if you have them!  
> Sorry, I took so long with these two updates, I had planned to have them up this past weekend, but I ended up taking an unplanned trip to the hospital at the end of last week (speaking of medical emergencies), and have been trying to rest and recover since. I’m okay (thankfully!), it’s just thrown my schedule off a little bit. This Flashback still has four chapters, and will be concluded in the next—though I definitely plan to revisit this era sometime in the next Arc!

_“Red!”_ a voice screeched from across the clearing and Bart was back, skidding to a stop on his knees and shins at Tim’s side. “Red! Are you okay? What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Talk to me!”

“Pain,” Tim choked out and latched on to Bart’s offered hand to try to steady himself.

“Red—“

“Robin—“

“S-so much… _pain_ ,” Tim groaned and pressed into Bart’s chest, even as Conner yelled out in surprise at the piece of Kryptonite that was shoved in his face and stumbled back to the side as the point of Damian’s sword followed not too long after it. Tremors rocked Tim’s body so violently that it looked like he was trying to dry heave, and Bart was fairly certain he would have if he’d had anything on his stomach to get rid of. “’Pulse.”

“What’s happening?” Bruce demanded, sliding to a stop at Tim’s other side, much like Bart had done barely a second ago—voice deep and gravely in an almost in-human way as he did so—Oliver not too far behind him. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Bart shook his head, looking up at Bruce and the other Leaguers who had responded to the call of distress, too. “I walked away for like a minute because Wonder Girl called, and he and Superboy were talking, and then he screamed and Iranbackoverhereand—“

_“LET ME GO!”_ Conner snarled off in the distance, trying to throw Clark off of his back, but even with the obvious pain Clark was in from the Kryptonite still in Damian’s hand, Clark’s double under hook around Conner’s shoulders was just too strong for Conner to get out of—at least not while his mind was as scattered as it was with Tim whining and whimpering in pain barely twenty-feet away.

“Did he say anything after I left?” Bruce ignored the chaos around him, as he did a quick visual check of Tim and took stock of his visible injuries before he did anything else.

“Kon-El, you’ve got to _calm down_ ,” Clark growled back from where he still fought with Conner, bracing himself against the whip of Beast Boy’s tail as he and the other Titans tried to aid the Superboy from what they saw as an unproved attack. “We can’t let you anywhere near him until we know what’s happening and I need to help Batman!”

“But he’s hurt! He’s hurt and—“

“Children, I beg of you—desist!” J’onn pleaded.

“NOT UNTIL YOU LET HIM _GO_!” Cassie shrieked back, near hysterical as she tried to fight through the row of Leaguers now separating the small group from the Titans.

“Batman,” Diana’s hand tightened on her lasso on instinct as a new scent in the air caught her attention. “Is that—is he—“

“No!” Bruce growled back as Tim cried out again at another particularly sharp cramp, not looking up from where he and Bart had coaxed Tim flat onto his back and started cutting off various parts of his uniform for better access. “Red Robin is _not_ going into heat!”

“No,” Ollie shook his head, too—taking more time than Bruce had to put it together, but putting it together nonetheless. “No—it’s much worse than that.”

And then, like a switch had been flipped inside of him, he sprung to his feet and reached up to rip the collar open on his suit at the same time that he reached up to do the same with Dinah’s even as they continued to fight off the Titans.

“What—hey!” she protested, diverting the momentum of Blue Beetle’s attack and pinning him to the ground as she did so.

“Sorry, pretty bird,” he apologized, but didn’t stop to explain as he moved on to continue doing the same to the other members of the League who wore covers while they were in costume.

He didn’t need to, as a couple seconds later the wind changed direction, and the rest of the team picked up on the same thing in the air that Diana had and they all stiffened when they did.

“Arrow, it’s not going to be enough,” Diana called after him in concern, her body tensing even as J’onn gained control of most of the Titans and the small fight had all but stopped.

“I know, but it’s better than nothing,” Ollie stated as he detached his bow from its holder on his back and grabbed an arrow out of his quiver, nocking it without hesitation and shooting it straight up into the sky.

“How long?” Bruce asked, without looking away from where Tim was now whimpering on the ground and clutching at whatever parts of Bart and Bruce he could get his hands on.

“Fifteen minutes at most,” Ollie answered him before turning towards where Clark and J’onn were still dealing with the small mob of angry teenagers and children, yelling back and forth at each other as they tried to figure out what was going on and why two of their friends were on the ground in pain. “Supes, I need you up in the sky.”

“I’m a little busy—“ but then the smell hit him, and his dilated eyes snapped around to Tim almost predatorily. _“No.”_

“That’s why I need you—“

“Superboy—“

“Give him the shot—“

“I don’t know if that’s the best idea—“ Diana spoke up cautiously, her eyes on Conner’s as she did so.

_“The shot,”_ Ollie growled, and without hesitation, Damian had the syringe in his hand and the needle in Kon’s arm.

“What—no!” Conner protested, as he tried to move away, but his movements were stunted and uncoordinated. “What are you doing to me?”

“I’ll explain later—it’s not permanent,” Clark promised (although Ollie could tell it didn’t do much to ease Conner’s mind), and pushed himself back up to his feet as Damian re-boxed his Kryptonite. “I need a minute, Arrow.”

“We don’t have a minute,” Ollie informed him, eyes already scanning the horizon with an arrow nocked to his bow in anticipation. “Manhunter, do you have control of the children?”

“For now,” J’onn nodded his head, a bead of sweat slipping down his forehead at the restraint and power he was using. “They still have their free will, and I’m not influencing their thoughts, but I am communicating with them individually. So long as we remain peaceful, and I am not distracted, I will maintain control.”

“Good to know,” Ollie nodded his head, acknowledging both him and Dick over the comms unit in his ear. “Company is two minutes out. Supes?”

“I’m good,” Clark huffed from beside him, and under different circumstances Ollie might have argued with him, but as it was, they didn’t have the time. The gas he’d let off was good, and the strong scents of the members of the Justice League were doing a good job of covering up Tim’s individual scent as it worked—but the aroma of a freshly heating omega permeated the air, and nobody had any way of knowing just how far the scent had gotten before Ollie had been able to deploy the cloaking arrow.

“Then, let’s go,” Ollie climbed up on to his shoulders with the help of Clark’s offered hand and Dinah took over giving orders as Clark levitated them up into the air fifteen to twenty feet above where Bruce was still doing a quick triage of all of Tim’s injuries and injecting him with all kinds of chemicals that she could only guess at as Bruce and Bart kept emptying syringes.

“Flash, take up a perimeter and divert any strays you get sniffing our tails. Hawkman, Hawkwoman, take over guarding the robot with Captain Atom. Cyborg—I want that thing eviscerated, _now_. Wonder Woman, set up a post on that boulder where you can watch both the horizon and the kids. Captain Marvel, see if you can help Martian with the kids and get them to calm down some,” she addressed the crowd around her before she turned around and activated her own comms unit, flipping through the channels until she found the static that indicated the Outlaws’ frequency. Tim’s pheromones burned at her insides with every breath she took, but she focused on the task at hand and schooled her body into its usual submission as she barked orders and tried to keep everybody from doing something that they would later regret. “Speedy—what’s your arsenal looking like?”

“Generous at the moment—but we’re teetering on the edge,” Roy answered her with an ease to his voice that Dinah had always envied due to the way that it permeated throughout his entire being (unless he was mad about something), even as the rest of the League moved to do as she’d said. “Genoa was a lot worse than we thought it was going to be, and we got into a couple of fights on the way here—“

“I already said I was sorry,” Dinah could just make out Dick mumbling in the background, and Dinah could only furrow her eyebrows in confusion.

“—But, we’ll be good for transport,” Roy went on as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “We can probably fly a couple of people back up to Gotham to pick up a Zeta Tube, or drop a couple of explosives if you need us to, but if it’s a Med E-VAC you’re looking for, we might not be the best idea…why?”

“’Cause we need a med e-vac and we need it fast,” Dinah sighed, trying to think through as many possible scenarios as she could in the time allowed, and figure out what course of action gave Tim the best chance at survival. On the one hand, putting Tim into a vehicle that was under stocked was probably a bad idea, but on the other, Bruce hadn’t brought the Bat Wing with him, and keeping Tim out in the open was an even worse one. “You still have that tech Green gave you to take care of Hood’s particular constitution?”

“…Yes,” Roy answered her tentatively, obviously not sure why she was asking about the filter that Ollie had given them to double filter any air coming in or out of their jet at the flip of a switch. “I should, but I’m not sure—“

“Why?” Jason’s voice barked over the line, and Dinah winced as she realized she’d be the one who had to deliver the news.

“Because there’s been a…situation,” Dinah answered him as vaguely as she could, trying to figure out how to explain something to them that she didn’t really understand herself. “Starfire, can you fly that thing?”

“Of course,” Starfire’s answer was immediate and only a little confused as to why she was being asked such a question at such a time.

“Then, get ready to take the controls—we’re going to need the boys on the ground. Red Robin’s down.”

“But, B said—“ Dick started to protest, but Dinah cut him off.

“It wasn’t the robot, the flying projectile you guys caught on your scanners earlier was Superboy—or at least something pretending to be Superboy. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but there was a delayed negative effect on Red’s system—“

“What are his symptoms?” Dick’s voice slipped down into a clinical tone that Dinah had only heard a handful of times in her life.

“Batman is the one—“

“You have eyes and ears, don’t you?” Jason snapped, and Dinah started listing off things she’d noticed automatically.

“Severe tremors—full body from what I can see. Unbearable pain stemming from his lower abdomen, but I don’t know where specifically. As far as I can tell he has no severe injuries, but he’s scenting more than I’ve ever smelled an omega scent in heat—“

“Is he laying with his knees open and unable to communicate?” Jason questioned in a much more controlled tone.

“Yes,” Dinah confirmed, and she swore she could hear Jason push the jet to fly faster as he swore rather fragrantly and things started clicking and beeping in the background.

“He’s going into pheromone shock,” Dick explained when it became apparent that Dinah didn’t know what Jason was flipping out about—or maybe he was explaining it to Roy and Kori. Dinah didn’t know. Either way, she still didn’t get it.

“I thought that was only possible when—“

“It is,” Dick reassured her, his tone reassuring, and Dinah’s jaw fell open as she turned around to stare between the omega lying on the ground whimpering and the clone twenty feet away, who was still—in spite of everything that was going on, and the serum of Kryptonite currently making it’s way through his blood stream—watching Tim as if he was afraid the smaller man was going to disappear in front of his eyes. “Does B need more suppressants?”

“I don’t know—“

“Then, _ask!_ ” Jason hissed, sounding more hostile than Dinah had heard him in years.

“Yes!” Bruce’s voice cut through the feed—tense and distracted, but very much there, and very much panicked. “No matter what I do, he won’t stop! Both Robin and I have our collars off, but it’s not doing anything. Speedy—nock a reinforced arrow and take over Superboy so Robin is free to help when you get here.”

“You got it, boss,” Roy acknowledged, the edge and grit to his voice letting them all know he realized the severity of the situation and was focusing in for the job, at the same time that Dinah could here Dick mumbling about grabbing the suppressants in the background.

“Is that Superman and Arrow in the sky?” Jason diverted the conversation, and Dinah spun back around to look up in the sky and she spotted them off in the distance, coming in much too fast for her liking.

“Yes,” Dinah answered, forcing herself back into her battle state of mind. “Do not engage. The Titans are having mixed reactions so keep an eye out for them. B and Kid Flash are both out of commission, but they’re all right.”

“Arrow let off a scent cover?”

“Yes,” Dinah nodded. “But it’s not working very well. We’ve got another ten minutes if we’re lucky—“

“No—no!” a sudden cry rang out through the bay and Dinah’s head snapped around to the source of the voice, flexing all of the muscles in her legs and dropping down into a crouch as she did so. “Let me go—let me—“

“Green Arrow—“

“I’ve got ‘im,” Ollie acknowledged Hawkman’s request calmly, letting his arrow go a second later to release a net over the struggling Lagoon Boy, who had only been intercepted from pouncing on Tim at the last minute by Barry and an uncomfortable looking Captain Atom.

“The scent is too strong,” J’onn spoke up again, voice thin with the strain of focus and effort. “I am having to interfere with their thoughts. We need to get them away—“

“If we move them too far they’ll take the scent with them,” Barry cut him off, more out of a need for time than disrespect or disagreement. “We’ve only got about a one hundred yard radius before the cover breaks, and there are traces of the scent almost a mile away. It’s nothing that’s discernable, and I don’t think it will attract any attention, but that on top of everything else that’s gone on and the increased saturation on their suits from them being so close…I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Back ‘em up as far as you can,” there was a light pant in Bruce’s voice, due to the fear that was coursing through him as his third son just continued to deteriorate under his hands. “Push them back against the robot. ’Wing?”

“Coming in hot,” Dick answered him calmly, and Dinah looked back up towards the plane only to realize they were much closer and much lower than they should have been, even as she registered the sound of Dick lighting up his escrima sticks in the background. “Twenty seconds.”

“East or west?” Oliver’s voice cut through the feed.

“West,” Jason answered, and Dinah realized for the first time that Clark had lost his comms unit during the fight as Ollie had to relay the direction before Clark shifted them out of the jet’s path. “Fifteen seconds.”

“You good for the transition, Star?” Roy asked.

“I believe so,” she answered him, concentrated but confident.

“Ten seconds,” there was an edge to Dick’s voice that Dinah couldn’t place, but the roar of the engines was too loud for Dinah to analyze it.

She was confused for a breath—the jet was still coming in just as fast as it had been in the first place, and it was headed straight for them (straight for her!) without anywhere to land, but then she realized what they were doing and bellowed for everyone to get down.

Dinah herself jumped out of the way and rolled in the grass as the plane streaked by where her torso had been just seconds ago, and even with everything that was going on, Dinah took a second to appreciate the skill of the pilot (or just their dumb luck) as they pulled up just in time to avoid crashing into the ground and increased their altitude to miss the robot and the rest of the people standing around, while still remaining low enough for Jason, Dick, and Roy to jump out of a hatch in the bottom of it and touch down on the ground where they needed to be.

“Are you insane?” she yelled as the plane banked off towards the water, but none of the three of them paid any attention. They were too focused on what they were doing.

“Robin,” Roy seamlessly took over responsibility for Superboy and Damian only hesitated for a second before he re-sheathed his sword and turned to join his father and two youngest older brothers on the ground.

“Hood—Father, what is going on?” he asked as he fell down next to the speedster who was vibrating anxiously and murmuring to Tim, who’s head was pillowed in his lap, but neither one of them answered as they continued talking amongst themselves.

“Talk to me, B,” Jason prompted, falling to his knees in between Tim’s legs. He reached forward and ran his hands softly over Tim’s skin (doing a physical exam of his own), causing Tim to whimper, before he softened his voice and leaned down to try to help distract Tim from the pain. As best as Dinah could tell, he’d left his Hood up on the plane, and she heard more of his words than wanted to. “Shh, shh. I know it hurts, baby bird, but I have to do it. I have to see what’s going on, so I can fix it. It’s all going to be okay in a little bit. I promise.”

Dick crouched down not too far behind him, eyes never leaving the increasingly agitated Titans and League members once as he dropped a bag to the ground and kicked it back towards Jason and Bruce before he stood back up to his full height and bared his teeth and his escrima sticks in warning as Cassie tried to step forward.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Bruce shook his head, eyebrows furrowing in frustration as he looked down at Tim and tried to answer Jason’s unasked questions. “I don’t even know where to start. He was fine this morning, but he took several bad hits during the fight and then he climbed through the robot and—“

“You know this has nothing to do with that,” Jason admonished him quietly, reaching behind himself for the bag and sliding it over the sand and gravel towards Bruce. “It’s pheromone shock. It can only come from one place.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bruce sighed, reaching up to run a tired hand over his cheek and the cowl. “But the hormones should have stopped that, and this isn’t stopping. It’s getting worse.”

“Well, of course, it is—he’s Red,” Jason joked because that was what Robins did in situations like these, even as he grabbed Tim’s wrist and started taking a pulse, only to drop it after confirming it was too high to count. Without hesitating, he started keeping a mental log of everything he saw and did. “Give me stats, B. I need data. What have you given him so far? How long has this been happening?”

“Superboy arrived thirty-two minutes ago,” Bruce answered him—the combination of dry humor and the demand for empirical numbers snapping him into Batman-mode—as Jason scrambled in the bag for a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff. “The pain didn’t start until approximately seventeen minutes ago.”

“Approximately?” Jason questioned as he shoved the blood pressure cuff into Bart’s hands and placed the stethoscope against Tim’s chest.

“He didn’t tell us at first,” Bruce answered him with a glare towards Tim’s face, and Jason rolled his eyes before he closed them in an effort to eliminate distractions as he listened to several different points on Tim’s body before he ripped the stethoscope off and handed it to Damian, jamming his comms unit back in his ear as he did so.

“I need a blood pressure—try once in his arm because that will be the most comfortable for him and most accurate, but if you can’t get it, we’re switching to his leg—I NEED ANOTHER HAND!”

Dinah was in between him and Bruce in seconds, “I’m here—“

Before she could get the words out, Jason had a knife out of its sheath on his thigh and in her hands, “I need his pant legs and boots off, _now_.”

And that was when she noticed all of the blood on the ground. It was everywhere. No matter where she looked, there was blood on everything and the smell of it quickly overcame the hormones in the air and made her want to gag with the sheer strength of it.

Dinah only gave herself a second to be overwhelmed by it before she reached down and started doing as she was told, shutting down the rest of her mind, and focusing solely on the task at hand as she hacked at the think armor of Tim’s suit.

“B—he needs a shot of propranolol and probably some SNP or vasopressin depending on his blood pressure…Robin?” he looked up to the youngest expectantly.

“No good,” Damian shook his head as he pulled the stethoscope out of his ears, and undid the cuff from Tim’s arm and Jason swore as he batted Damian’s hand away and reached down to reattach it to Tim’s recently uncovered thigh himself.

“What have you given him so far?” Jason asked as he shoved one of the earpieces of the stethoscope back into his free ear.

“Four shots of progesterone and two testosterone—along with a shot of estrogen, and five hits of electrolytes—but none of them seemed to have any affect.”

Jason swore again.

“Anything besides that?” Jason looked up as he released the pressure on the cuff and ripped it off of Tim completely.

“No,” Bruce shook his head.

“God _damn it_ ,” Jason swore with even more vehemence than he had before and Dinah would have chuckled if she wasn’t so busy falling on her butt trying to get Tim’s shoes off.

“What did he do—glue them on here?” she asked no one in particular, just to have something to say, and she was surprised when Bruce snorted at her.

“Pretty much.”

“The jet will be ready for EVAC in five,” Dick’s voice flowed back over the group like water through the comms units in their ears.

“We might not have five,” Roy’s voice wasn’t nearly as welcome, but he wasn’t wrong either as he eyed the scene around them. The Titans were damn near going out of their minds at the smell, and members of the League were starting to struggle, too.

“Flash, Cyborg—form a barrier with ‘Wing,” Bruce ordered, even as he and Bart switched places at Jason’s order—the Red Hood himself leaning over to whisper reassuringly into a lethargically fighting Tim’s ear and support his weight as he was jostled uncomfortably in the move. “Robin, take back Superboy so Speedy can join them. Superman, Green Arrow—close the ranks.”

“But—“

“ _Do it_ ,” Bruce growled as he stabbed a midline down into Tim’s chest, and nobody argued.

“What can I do?” Dinah asked as she finally succeeded in pulling the last scraps of Tim’s pants legs off—only the top half of his suit and the crotch piece remained.

“Hold this,” Jason shoved the half-liter of saline hastily attached to the midline into her hand, and she did as she was told, moving up a little along Tim’s body so the tubing wasn’t in the way.

“I don’t understand—“

“None of us do, really,” Jason shook his head, not stopping his work with his hands as he did so, but his words were calm and collected as he addressed Dinah’s confusion in a way he hadn’t been earlier. “But Red here is a special bird, and it seems as though his body has decided the only way to deal with Superboy returning is to send all of his systems into overdrive and see if that scares Superboy back to the dead, so he doesn’t have to deal with the heartbreak anymore, and this is the end result of that… Half a liter isn’t going to be enough—we need blood.”

“Arrow can give it in the jet,” Bruce decided, and Jason didn’t argue.

“We can skip the testosterone, then,” he mused to himself instead, even as Bruce started to administer another round of shots and medications via the midline. “Starfire?”

“Yes?” she answered back over the comms.

“Have you reached the point in the sequence that you can step away from the controls?” he asked, ignoring the small spray of blood on his face and neck as he pulled an errant piece of shrapnel out of Tim’s side and ribcage.

“Yes,” Starfire answered him again.

“Then can you do me a favor, and head to the back of the plane and start charging up the defibrillator?”

“Of course,” Starfire answered him.

“Thanks, sweet heart,” Jason acknowledged her before he reached back up to turn his comms unit off. “If his heart rate hasn’t dropped twenty beats in the next three minutes, I’m going to need the Flash to shock him.”

“Hood, that’s dangerous—“ Bart started to protest, but cut off when Jason looked up to glare at him for the briefest of seconds.

“So is having his heart rate so high I can’t count it,” he reminded Bart before looking back down at Tim and getting back to work. “We need an EVAC route—what’s the plan?”

“Fire’s going to circle back around and do a Temp Land over in the field,” Roy provided first. “We’ll have forty-five seconds to get him in before we have to take off again.”

“That’s not a very large window,” Dinah frowned.

“It’s enough,” Jason reassured her, grunting as he took the five-inch needle Bruce handed him and shoved it down through Tim’s abdomen and injected the numbing fluids it held straight into Tim’s uterine cavity.

“The jet can’t carry all of us,” Dick reminded them, sinking further into his crouch as Captain Marvel finally lost control and pounced.

“You and I can take the controls,” Roy offered calmly as he released his arrow to knock Marvel out of the sky so Clark and Diana could wrestle him to the ground without much of a fight in his distraction. “Arrow can fly in the back with Hood and B and Red, and the Kid shouldn’t take up much room—“

He paused as he let another arrow fly towards Lagoon Boy in warning, whom had been freed from his net by the Titans not too long after he’d initially been captured.

“—The jet should be fine to carry him, too. We don’t have room for Supes or Robin, though.”

“I will follow,” Clark panted from where he struggled to keep Captain Marvel pinned to the ground. Wonder Woman stood with her boot on the back of his head, pushing his face down into the ground, and the smell of the dirt and earth actually seemed to be helping as Captain Marvel slowly relaxed and stopped fighting (though clearly continued to breathe). “And I’ll bring Superboy and Robin with me.”

“I don’t think that’s the best—“

“He has the right to come,” Clark cut Oliver off with as much of a glare as he could give the man at the awkward angle. “He has no idea what’s going on, and at the end of the day they’re still friends.  ‘Sides, I’m not leaving him alone with the shot still fucking up his system. It’s experimental—we have no idea how much damage it can do because he’s half human—and I’m not leaving Red Robin either, not when he’s so vulnerable. Superboy will control himself once we’ve had the time to sit down and explain it to him. I’m not debating this.”

“…Batman?” Oliver called back over his shoulder, after a breath or two of indecision.

“They can come,” Bruce gave the final word after Jason murmured something to him that even Dinah couldn’t hear, and Oliver left it at that. “Robin can handle himself, and Superboy might prove useful later on.”

“Thank you,” Clark caught his eyes across the field.

Bruce didn’t acknowledge him verbally—instead he just held his gaze and ordered, “Give us a five minute head start.”

“Understood,” Clark nodded his head.

“Two minutes to EVAC, Hood,” Dick updated them on the clock.

“Thanks, Wing,” Jason threw back over his shoulder before turning his attention to Bruce. “What’s his pulse looking like?”

“It’s come down some since you gave him the beta-blocker.”

“Far enough that he can go the next five minutes without being shocked?”

“…Yes,” Bruce answered him after a heartbeat of silence, and Jason didn’t argue.

“A minute-thirty,” Dick grunted as one of his escrima sticks made contact with Cassie’s arm before Diana could get her lasso around the girl’s torso and drag her back away from their little group as the defensive line all took a step back towards where Tim lay on the ground and closer to each other.

“Wonder Girl, _no_!” Diana gave a grunt of her own as she struggled with her protégée. “You have to fight it! He’s your friend!”

“Canary, are you and Flash okay to take over here, once we leave?” Bruce ignored them as he looked over at Dinah expectantly.

“Yes,” Dinah answered him without hesitation. She wasn’t sure she believed it—she had no idea how they were going to deal with the aftermath of this with both Bruce and Clark gone (not to mention Oliver), but she knew with out a doubt she wasn’t about to try to drag one of the three of them away from a broken Robin. That was nothing short of suicide. They would have to find a way. “We’ll manage.”

“Thank you,” he looked honestly relieved.

“A minute-ten,” Dick spoke up again. “How do you want to do this, Hood?”

“I’m thinking,” Jason answered him distractedly.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Damian piped up for the first time since Bruce sent him back away from Tim, and Jason spared a second to roll his eyes as Dick grinned.

“Nobody asked you, Brat.”

“It’s just what Red would say if he were awake,” Damian shrugged.

“Canary, can you take over Superboy for a minute?” Jason’s tone changed as he looked up at Dinah again.

“Sure,” she answered him, a little confused.

“Awesome—Robin, give her your Kryptonite for a minute,” Jason ordered, shifting up from his shins to a foot and a knee as he started noodling his latest plan through, even as he gave orders.   “Speedy, fall back and cover ‘Wing as he cuts through to the jet. Robin, take Nightwing’s place. Impulse, take the IV bag and the first aid kit, and brace Red’s hips when we pick him up.”

“Got it,” Bart nodded his head, reaching to do as he was told so Dinah was free to get up and trade places with Damian just seconds before the jet came to hover in circles over the field as it started descending to the ground.

“CYBORG, ROBIN, GREEN, FLASH—COVER OUR PATH. GREEN, BREAK OFF ONCE HE’S OUT OF SIGHT.”

“GOT IT!” they only heard Oliver’s response because of the comms units in their ears.

“FORTY-FIVE SECONDS!” Dick updated again, eyes flashing up to the jet as it’s hover blades started whipping around the scent even worse than before.

“WE’RE ALMOST READY—HOLD ON!” Jason hollered back at him. “B, YOU GOT HIS HEAD AND SHOULDERS?”

“YEAH!”

“I’VE GOT HIS LEGS—“

“HE MIGHT START THRASHING IF WE PICK HIM UP.”

“I KNOW,” Jason nodded his head, moving to get the best grip he possibly could on Tim’s legs, given the circumstances. “ON ‘WING’S COUNT!”

“THIRTY SECONDS,” Dick yelled.

“HOOD, THIS ISN’T A GOOD IDEA!” Bruce yelled over the noise. “WE NEED A STRETCHER OR—“

“WE DON’T REALLY HAVE THAT MUCH OF A CHOICE!” Jason yelled back, flinching as Diana finally lost control and half of the field erupted into a chaos even worse than what they’d seen earlier.

“I’M WITH HOOD ON THIS—“ Bart tried to join Jason’s side, but Dick’s yell that it was time cut them off, and whether Bruce wanted to or not he reached down and hefted Tim up as carefully as he could.

Roy hesitated just long enough to shoot an exploding arrow at Cassie before he dropped his bow down to his waist and turned to follow Dick towards the jet, keeping his head down to the wind and ignoring what was going on behind him as he went.

Kori was still coaxing the jet down the last hundred feet or so, and Dick had timed it perfectly. He and Roy were jumping up onto the gate and pulling themselves up on to it before it even touched down.

“Med supplies?” he called over the comms.

“Top right,” Roy answered him, pointing to the compartments that they kept their emergency medical equipment in, and Dick nodded his head once in acknowledgement as Roy moved to pull the examination table out of the floor for Dick to start piling stuff on.

“RED, I’M GOING TO NEED THE CRASH BAG!” Jason yelled over the comms unit, about twenty feet away.

“Got it!” Roy acknowledged him before he turned his attention back to what he was doing with the click of one of the support joints of the table locking into place. He raised his hand to point at one of the compartments when Dick turned his head to look at him expectantly, “Up there.”

Dick didn’t respond to him, just opened the door and reached up to fish out the overstuffed black bag, and Roy was perfectly okay with that.

“Should I unpack it or leave it?”

“Leave it,” Roy answered as he reached down to pull a collapsible IV poll up out of the compartment underneath of the table. “That way he’ll know where everything is—open it up for him, though.”

“Okay,” Dick nodded his head as he moved to do as he was told. “Where’s your med stash?”

“In the drawer under the table—you know how to fly this thing?”

“Push buttons and see what they do?” Roy couldn’t see Dick’s eyebrows, but he’d spent enough time around those who wore masks to recognize the changes in his facial features that indicated that he was.

“Oh, dear god—I’m not paid enough for this,” he rolled his own eyes and groaned as he screwed the last part of the IV poll into place, up by the head of the bed. “Just do what I tell you and don’t move the presets on my seat and I’ll take the blame for anything you do wrong with Hood and Fire.”

“Deal,” Dick nodded his head once in agreement, face all business again. “Do you have ice or heat packs?”

“In the trap door on the floor,” Roy jutted his chin towards the panel in the floor that housed the storage unit that Dick needed as he turned toward the cockpit, and Dick dropped down into a crouch to get what he needed. Roy had a basic understanding of what was going on with Tim, but he was by no means as much of an expert on it as Jason (or apparently Dick) was, and was more than happy to leave the treatment plan to the rest of the team as he focused on getting them all back to the Cave in one piece. “Starfire, is the countdown set?”

“Yes,” she answered him, without looking away from the blinking controls in front of her. “There are forty-three seconds left of—mmph!”

The redhead made a noise of protest and brought her hands up to grip onto Roy’s forearm as he wrapped his hand around her mouth and blocked out her nose with the bend between his thumb and his forefinger, but she didn’t try to fight him as he pulled her up out of her seat.

“Sorry, pretty girl, but you’re not used to this,” he apologized as he locked his other arm around her waist and escorted her out the back of the plane, trying to ignore the sight of Tim writhing in Bruce and Jason’s arms as they crossed paths. Kori jerked in Roy’s arms when Tim’s scent finally washed over her, but a second later she jerked again and fell back into Roy’s embrace limply, and Roy pressed a kiss to her hair as she trusted him to guide her out of plane as she closed her eyes and stopped breathing until they were finally out into the open air of the clearing.

“’WING!” Jason called tersely as he stepped up on to the gate.

“I’m here,” Dick materialized at Tim’s side immediately, wrapping his right arm underneath of Tim’s ribcage to help hoist him up onto the bed as his left hand reached up to caress at the side of Tim’s face, and his voice dropped down into what he hoped was a comforting whisper. “Hey, baby bird. It’s okay—you’re okay. I’m here. Big brother ‘Wing is here, but you have to calm down. You have to stop trying to kick Hood.”

“Hhnn,” the only response Tim gave was a particularly pained whine, but slowly he did as Dick asked and let his legs fall to the table.

“Good boy,” Dick praised as his bare fingers slipped up into Tim’s hair to scratch gently at his scalp, and Jason focused on the sweet lull of his voice as he quickly devested himself of his jacket and his gloves. “Good job, Red. I’m so proud of you, little brother. So, proud. Just a little bit longer and it’ll all be okay. You’re doing so well.”

“Where do you want me?” Oliver didn’t bother with pleasantries as he shouldered his bow across his back.

“Up by the cockpit,” Jason answered Ollie without hesitating, pulling the Crash Bag towards himself as he started to root through it for things that he would need. “There’s nowhere for you to sit down, but you can take the floor once the transfusion is over with.”

“Alright,” Ollie agreed with a shrug of his shoulder as Dick tried to ease Tim back onto the table from where he’d been trying to curl up around Dick’s torso.

“Shh, baby bird. It’s okay—you’re okay,” Dick reassured, but Jason doubted Tim understood what he was really saying. “I just need you to lie back down on the table. Just like that—no, on your back. Please, baby bird—”

“Arsenal—where’s the lidocaine?” Jason called after he’d checked its compartment in the bag twice without finding it.

“In your hand,” Roy answered him straight-facedly—barely glancing Jason’s way as he headed back towards the cockpit—and Jason looked down to realize he was right.

“We’re not putting that in the report we give to B,” he sighed tiredly as he set the syringe down on the table and went back to pulling more things out of the bag.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ollie smirked as he leaned against the wall of the plane, and Dick sent Jason a grin over his shoulder from where he was still trying to calm Tim down so Bart could secure the safety restraints around various parts of his body while Bruce rolled his eyes and started prepping Oliver’s arm for the transfusion.

“Yes, because B is just _so_ judgmental, lying to him _must_ be the answer.”

“Hood, you ready for take off?” Roy called as he settled down into what was usually Jason’s seat and started flipping switches and hitting buttons—one of which set the back gate into motion—whilst Bruce’s eyes caught on Damian’s over the distance and they both nodded at each other in understanding, all joking and sarcasm gone. “We can’t wait any longer.”

“Yeah,” Jason answered him, dropping the stuff in his hands to the table as he reached down to brace his hands on either side of Tim’s legs because Tim hadn’t stopped squirming enough for Bart to strap them down. “Go.”

“Grab on,” Roy instructed the remaining occupants of the jet and it wasn’t even three seconds later that the plane was jerking back into the air.

It shuttered a couple of times, and rocked back and forth on the wind for a moment, as Roy cursed and muttered at it quite liberally—Oliver anchoring himself to the roof with one hand, his other arm wrapped around Bruce’s waist to hold Bruce steady, as Bruce braced Tim’s head and shoulders to the bed with his hands; Dick grunting as he shifted his weight and let one of his feet slip to brace itself against the joint of the wall and the floor as he secured the bulk of Tim’s weight around Tim’s waist and Tim’s ribcage with his arms and his torso; and Bart swaying dangerously as he held on to the other wall of the plane for dear life—before it leveled out and eased the rest of the way up into the air just in time for the engines to switch over methods of flight so Roy could coax it forward into motion.

“Don’t worry, Timmers,” Jason sighed as the locks of the gate clanked into place behind him, and he released his grip on the bed so he could go back to what he was doing. The only sign of acknowledgement he got in response from Tim was a whimper. “We’ve got you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that we’re through all of that, I just wanted to take a moment to explain some things that I wasn’t quite able to squeak into the story—  
> Everybody was so concerned about the robot and getting it disabled because both Kon and Damian broke protocol and mentioned Tim’s civilian name within the robot’s (and it’s recording system’s) presence.  
> In reference to Dinah’s comment about Clark losing his earpiece, Kon stole it back in the first chapter so that he could talk to Tim as everybody was panicking over the robot trying to shoot itself into space.  
> There is nothing romantic behind Jason calling Starfire “sweetheart”. That was just Jason being a sweetheart.  
> Roy’s “Pretty Girl” was most definitely romantic, however, their relationship does not last, and Roy has moved on to another relationship by the time that Part One happens (spoilers).  
> Both Dinah and Ollie are alphas—I don’t think I mentioned that anywhere, but they are. So is Roy. So are Diana and Cassie.  
> In my head, The Outlaw’s aircraft as an advanced/modified version of a tiltrotor/tiltjet hybrid (which, for those of you who are not familiar with planes, are planes whose propellers or engines can move on an axis to allow the aircraft to hover over the ground or perform vertical take offs and lands (VTOL), where the propellers are set down into the wings (similar to a Quin-jet in the Marvel universe).  
> The reason there was an edge to Dick’s voice as he gave the ten second warning was because Jason was still the one flying the plane. He was still in his seat with his belt buckled, and Starfire literally took the controls from him as she pulled the plane up out of it’s dive, and he jumped out of the plane in the same motion he used to pull himself up out of the chair. That was why Dick was (understandably) stressed (and a little annoyed). It’s my headcanon, that of all of the teams in the DCU, The Outlaws are one of the most efficient, because they all think similarly, and to me, pulling off a stunt like that (and have it be something that they’d actually practiced and had use for in the past), was a perfect way of showing it, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t slip that little detail into the narrative of the story, so I thought I’d share it here.  
> Similarly, on the mechanism of Oliver’s scent cover arrow—basically, it more or less releases a chemical into the air that bonds with and eliminates the affects of pheromones in the air, but it’s not exactly an instantaneous thing. It takes time for the chemical reaction to happen in the first place, and furthermore, Tim continued to give off pheromones at a rate that was faster than the chemical reaction could take place. Eventually, it will catch up and eliminate all of the pheromones in the vicinity, but it’s more of a clean up type of thing to purify an area of a scent after it’s been released, than one to stop it from spreading in the first place. Also, because it explodes in the air and not on the ground, the gas makes a kind of bubble over the area to stop the scent from expanding out its dome-like cloud. Ollie originally started pulling heroes’ scent covers off as a way to try to mask Tim’s individual smell so that nobody could use it to blow his cover down the road.  
> And last but not least, the shot that they give Kon, does not, in fact, paralyze him or anything of the sort. Instead, what it does is strip him of most of his powers (mostly the TTK, and super strength, and heat vision). The reason he stops fighting is because of the shock and confusion of what’s going on. Eventually, after a moment or two to adjust, he actually could have gotten up and potentially won a fight against Damian or Dinah and gotten to Tim, but regardless of how long he’s been gone, or what’s going on around him, he trusts Clark, and Bruce, and Bart, and he has no idea what’s happening to Tim and if they say he should stay away, he’s going to listen to them, at least for now. If they had tried to take Tim out of his sight without having a definite plan in place, he would have attacked and prevented it from happening. Interestingly enough, because of this trust he and Dinah are the only two who don’t end up caught up in the skirmish at the end between the heroes who lose control and the ones who are able to control their hormones. On a similar note, the shot affects Kon’s hormone production and slows it tremendously (because it is my headcanon that the two are related because metas’ physiology and chemical balances are (slightly) different than humans’) and that is why his body stays calm and he doesn’t go into the alpha equivalent of what is happening to Tim. More explanations as to what happened to Tim will come in the next chapter, but after writing so much about the shot in this chapter, I couldn't find a way to actually explain it in the story. Oops.


	4. Chapter Four

The air was cool and distinctly subterranean as Tim woke up, and Tim immediately reconfigured his thought processes to account for the fact that he was no longer on a beach in the South Eastern United Stated or a in a plane somewhere over the interim distance, but rather in the Bat Cave underneath of the Manor. It was hard to describe what exactly it was that confirmed Tim suspicions—there wasn’t a single _clue_ that gave it all away—but he knew as soon as his thoughts stopped chasing circles around one another that he was right.

The wetness in the air and the water lapping in the distance help to reassure Tim that he had received the best possible care while he was unconscious, but the knowledge that he was in the Cave was also calming in and of itself, because the Cave meant family, and family meant that Tim wasn’t alone, no matter what had happened.

Tim supposed it was probably a screwed up thought process that led to him associating the Cave with family instead of the Manor, but the Cave was where all of the different Bats came together and were safe, and it wasn’t always happy—in fact, some of their worst arguments had taken place in the main room of the Cave—but the true bonds of the family and the pack prospered in the stone and soiled walls, and the Cave was where they looked each other and went ‘yeah, we’ve got a cluster-cuss of issues between the bunch of us, but we’re family and we’re going to sit down and work it out’. That was a feeling Tim had never known until he’d started training with Dick and Bruce over on the mats, and it was something he’d never found anywhere else—except for in his friendships with Bart and Kon—and he damn sure wasn’t going to let it go without a fight (not that he really had that much of a choice anymore because he was pretty sure Dick would follow him to the ends of the earth with that sad, little, kicked puppy dog face of his, and where Dick went all of the bats went—barring Cass, but she would follow Steph and Dami, if she wasn’t one step ahead of Tim waiting to punch him in the face and forcibly drag him back to the manor when he got wherever it was he decided to go—and Tim knew there was no getting away from it, no matter what his decisions were).

A shift of a weight on the mattress at Tim’s left side quickly pulled his thoughts away from reflections of the Cave and calculations he wasn’t even entirely aware he was making, and it only took a second of observation for Tim realize that the weight was vibrating softly and therefor was probably Bart. Contrary to popular belief, Bart vibrated in his sleep—at least when he was dreaming—and Tim somehow always found himself unable to say no to the younger man’s request to have “sleepovers”, no matter how many times he’d woken up to being kicked in the face (especially since Bart had come back from the dead three months before). Another shallow inhale only confirmed Tim’s theory—Bart had a very unique scent, even if it wasn’t as strong as some of the other metas or Jason or Bruce or Dick—and it also confirmed that Tim hadn’t just had the worst nightmare of his life, and that Connor Kent was, in fact, sitting next to him, in the supposed flesh.

“I know you’re awake,” said Kent’s voice cut through Tim’s chest like a knife from somewhere off to his right, but Tim refused to look sheepish as he opened his eyes to look over at him (even if Kon had already heard the jerk of his heart rate at the voice).

Kon sat off to Tim’s right, just like Tim had thought. He wasn’t half naked like he had been earlier—instead, he was wearing an old sweatshirt of his that Tim had stolen years previous, but Tim squirmed uncomfortably when he realized Kon had left it unzipped over his chest. On the one hand, a naked Kon was always something that Tim wanted to look at—even if it was only in parts—but on the other, the untouchable sight hurt just as much as it had the first time Tim had seen him in the clearing, and Tim didn’t want anything to distract him from the conversation that he knew was going to come.

Kon had lounged back in his chair, fingers intertwined over his lap as he feigned nonchalance with one of his boots up on the edge of Tim’s hospital bed, but that hadn’t fooled Tim for a second. Kon’s go-to defense mechanism anytime he felt threatened or worried about someone he cared about was arrogance, and his body was tighter than a violin’s strings underneath of the façade.

Tim wasn’t in the Med-Bay like he would have expected, but rather out in the main part of the Cave, and the only explanation Tim had for that was Bruce’s fear of Tim being exposed to too many of Kon’s hormones at one time. There was also a suspicious lack of TTK buzzing around his body or in Kon’s general vicinity, but he’d yet to come up with a good explanation for that.

As was to be expected, Tim was hooked up to all kinds of machines: an IV pump fed into a central line docked between his shoulder and chest with a bag saline and what Tim assumed was a medication of some kind attached to it; a three-point heart monitor was attached to his chest and a pulse-ox monitor was wrapped around his finger; another EKG-type monitor was hooked up to electrodes around his lower abdomen and pelvis—and Tim knew that each one of them had feedback sensors that were sending information to a tablet that Bruce refused to let go (but was ignoring in favor of hounding Clark for information instead), and Tim was only mildly annoyed with the invasion of privacy. Vital signs weren’t nearly as indicative of all of the various things that people thought vital signs were indicative of, and if Bruce actually wanted to know what the reunion between Tim and Kon was going to be like, he would have just camped himself out in a chair on the other side of the bed from Kon and waited until Tim woke up so he could watch and listen to it himself.

Bruce was predictable and brash like that.

The thing that Tim hadn’t counted on, though, was the collection of nightstands and file cabinets and tables that had been stacked around him—piled high with large stacks of his clothes and blankets and belongings—surrounding him in a faint, but omnipotent, layer of his family and his pack’s scents, and it only took Tim a quick scan of the stuff to know that it had been collected from his room (and his apartment at the Tower), and that Bart was probably the one responsible for it. There were a handful of things that Tim couldn’t identify as his own: a couple of shirts that looked to be about Jason’s size, a pair of Dick’s favorite jeans, one of the three sweatshirts that Jaime owned; and Tim smiled as he recognized each of them and came to the conclusion that they’d either brought them down here themselves or stopped Bart on his one man mission and asked him to pass them along.

“So,” Kon’s drawl broke threw Tim’s thoughts, and Tim turned to look at him. “Are you going to tell me what the hell just happened, or am I going to have to ask?”

“…You don’t know?” Tim raised one of his eyebrows in question.

“How the fuck am I _supposed_ to?” Kon snapped, but he couldn’t see Tim wince because his eyes were closed and he was apparently too pissed off to notice Tim’s heart rate jump in response. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been dead for the last I don’t even know how long—“

“Thirteen months.”

“What?” Kon demanded, irritation flowing out of every single one of his pores, as his eyes snapped back open and he moved like he was ready to stand up and storm away.

“Thirteen months,” Tim repeated himself, voice a quiet steel as he refused to meet Kon’s angered gaze, not offering any kind of further explanation because Kon was Superboy and he should have been able to figure it the hell out. “And I’m sorry, but I assumed somebody already told you.”

The, _Or_ _you’d_ _figured_ _it_ _out_ _yourself,_ went unsaid because Tim was mad, but he wasn’t cruel.

“Are you kidding me?” Kon’s eyebrows shot up in incredulity and his tone changed so much it had Tim’s eyes flicking back up to his and the corners of his lips twitching as if they had the energy to smile. “They wouldn’t have told me you were still _alive_ if Bruce and Jason didn’t think there was some merit to me being here to help keep whatever just happened from happening again.”

“That’s probably true,” Tim conceded after a breath or so of thought. “But, I don’t know for sure what’s going on—I’ve been asleep for the last 16 hours in case _you_ hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah, I had,” Kon’s tone darkened again, but it seemed more introspective to Tim than accusatory, even though the annoyance with Tim was still clearly there. “And the only thing I know for sure is that something went wrong with your hormone levels, and you didn’t have any suppressants on you to help you take care of it. Nobody in this damned house is willing to tell me anything more than that, because apparently it’s my fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Tim shook his head, suddenly biting back tears as they stung at the corners of his eyes.

“That’s what I kept trying to tell them, but the brat kept pulling Kryptonite on me, and the only way he would agree to stop was for me to leave and go up into the Manor and you know how Bruce is with his security, nothing gets in or out without his fucking approval, and apparently I’m not approved, and—“

“ _Kon_ ,” Tim cut him off pointedly, but he wasn’t mad necessarily, he just wanted Kon to stop ranting. Tim already knew everything that he was saying, and the anger was making his headache worse.

“Sorry,” Kon responded about as sheepishly as he could get in his concerned state (which wasn’t very—his arms were still crossed over his chest, and every inch of his body was thrumming with an agitated type of tension that would have understandably had anybody but Tim terrified for their life—but he did look like he at least regretted the pain he’d caused Tim).

“It’s fine,” Tim brushed him off, reaching up to rub at his temples as he refused to meet Kon’s eyes and tried not to get the pulse ox monitor stuck in his hair. “You didn’t mean to.”

“Still,” Kon’s shoulders relaxed just the slightest bit, and for as frustrated as he was (and despite what a certain little Demon Snot thought), Tim knew that Kon _didn’t_ want to hurt him or make things worse—he just didn’t understand what was going on.

Tim and Kon fell silent following the brief outburst and Tim used the reprieve to go over his mental catalog of everything that had happened to him in the last twenty-four hours and double checked his math and his thought processes to make sure he hadn’t made any inaccurate assumptions about his own situation. He very clearly remembered the fight with the robot and fighting his way through the water, back towards shore, but things kind of went a little fuzzy after that, and the only thing Tim knew for sure was that he probably owed Jason and Dick a steak dinner (and maybe a new kris for Jason, if he’d actually tried to choke Dick out like he vaguely remembered doing).

Kon didn’t push Tim for answers as he thought, perhaps knowing Tim well enough to realize what he was doing or simply not caring about the lapse in conversation as Tim tried to get his brain in order, and Tim was thankful for it. Regardless of all of the conclusions that Tim had been able to draw based on the few flashes from the last day he remembered, Tim had no idea how Kon had come back to life or what he had been doing before he got to the beach with the robot (other than the fact that he was fairly certain it _was_ Kon, because there was no way Alfred would have allowed Tim to be alone with him (Bart didn’t count) if he wasn’t one-hundred percent certain that Kon was who he looked like), and Kon might be working on even less relative rest than Tim was.

Tim doubted it, Kon had been in fine form when he’d showed up at the battle scene earlier—yesterday, Tim corrected himself mentally—and Tim was pretty sure he would have gotten an earful from Kon if he’d been tired, but he wasn’t certain of everything that had happened and what Bruce had done while he was out of it (and his brothers—dear Batman, they’d probably tried to tear him apart), and Tim didn’t have enough evidence on hand to prove whether his assumptions were correct or not.

(And Tim hadn’t seen bags under Kon’s eyes like that since the last time that Lex had put him under a red sun.)

“Tim,” Kon said his name again—his quiet tone a very weird contrast to his still tense body language—and Tim heard the unspoken demand behind it ( _Please, tell me what happened, because if you don’t, I’ll make you, and neither one of us are going to like me after I do that,_ ), and he sighed as he looked around the Cave and forced himself to speak again.

“There was a reason I didn’t have anything on me, Kon—I wasn’t just being unprepared for the hell of it.”

“…And that reason was…?” Kon prompted with a raised eyebrow and an impatient bounce or two of his foot as Tim bit his lip and refused to go on.

“Because I haven’t needed suppressants for a while now,” Tim mumbled as he played with his own fingers to distract himself from the storm of emotions raging inside of his own body.

“Why not?” Kon pushed, his gaze burning against the top of Tim’s head.

“Because…” Tim trialed off, scooting back into the pillows behind his back and underneath of his head in spite of the pain the motions shot through his body.

“ _Timothy_ ,” Kon nearly snapped, patience worn thin as Tim beat around the bush.

“Because, my best friend died 13 months ago and my body shut down,” Tim finally broke down and gave him a straight answer, and winced when he saw Kon’s eyes widen and his jaw drop out of the corner of his eye.

“You…your body…what?” Kon struggled to speak as he tried to make sense of what Tim had just told him.

“It…it shut down, Kon,” Tim answered him nervously—self-consciously—as he picked at the blanket underneath of his fingers. “My ovaries, my uterine cavity, my lymph-nodes…everything, Kon. It all just…stopped. At first, I thought it was stress and the emotional toll of losing everybody all at once… Dad died, and then you, and then Bart, and Bruce followed not too long after…not to mention Cassie and Steph… I thought it was just…temporary…but then I started to move on from everybody else, and got back to…functioning…and it just…the pain from you was still there, and it…my cycle wasn’t. Somewhere along the line, with being an omega and everything, my body came to rely on you for your hormones. Yeah, I had Dick around and stuff, and I’m definitely a part of Bruce’s pack, but you…you were the one that I fell in love with… And even though my heart and my head knew they couldn’t have you, and had come to terms with that…my body didn’t seem to get the memo…and when you died…well…a part of me died, too.”

“I…How long?” Kon choked as he swallowed thickly, but on what, Tim didn’t know.

“I’m not sure,” he shook his head, keeping his voice quiet for fear of it shaking or giving away just how badly he wanted to cry. “Being around so many metas kind of throws everything into flux, but…I think there was a reason I stopped spending time around you when you were with Cassie.”

“Ah,” Kon made a noncommittal noise before he fell silent as he let that little piece of information sink in. Just as Tim had told him, he honestly wasn’t sure when his body has synched up to respond to Kon’s hormones so completely, but he’d subconsciously stopped spending extended amounts of time with Kon somewhere around the fall before he’d died, because it had hurt too much to see Kon so happy around Cassie. At the time, Tim had just thought it was an emotional thing, but after his heats had gone away, he’d started to realize that it hadn’t just been in his head. “And Damian?”

“Damian?” Tim’s head snapped up so he could look at Kon in confusion, and to Tim’s surprise, he was looking back calmly, but his arms were flexed across his chest and there was something hidden in the depths of his eyes that Tim couldn’t decipher. Tim just stared back at him for a moment, eyebrows furrowed as he searched over familiar features and waded through inhuman blue until finally—was it—could it have been…jealousy? “What about Damian? Oh, you mean—in the field yesterday? No—that’s not—that’s wasn’t—“

Tim stumbled over his own words for a moment before he finally composed himself enough to speak.

“Nothing’s going on between Damian and I—never has, never will,” he looked Kon firmly in the eye, his voice more confident as he tipped the playing field back on to ground he was familiar with. “He just—a lot of things happened after you died, Kon. I don’t know how much anybody has told you, or what you already know, but nothing romantic or physical has ever happened between Damian and I, and nothing ever will. Also, don’t think you’re getting out of telling me where you’ve been or how you came back to life, because you’re not, I just don’t have the mental capacity to deal with that right now—“

“Understood,” Kon acquiesced easily with a blink of his eyes and a shrug of his shoulders, and it was such a normal thing for Kon to do that Tim’s heart fluttered in his chest. “And to answer your question about how much I know, before you actually ask it again—not much. I’ve gathered that Bruce went away for awhile and that Jason and Dick are an official thing now—or they’re going to be an official thing once Dick gets his head out of his ass and just _goes_ for it—“

“Don’t even get me started on those two,” Tim rolled his eyes, temporarily distracted from his own plight by the mention of his brothers.

“It’s been obnoxious, hasn’t it?” Kon asked, sympathetic and knowingly.

“The _worst_ ,” Tim huffed a sigh. “I don’t think Bruce has figured it out yet, either.”

“Clark knows,” Kon hummed.

“He does?” Tim’s eyebrows furrowed.

“Well, I assume so,” Kon backtracked just a bit, obviously not wanting to put words into Clark’s mouth when he didn’t know if they were actually true or not. “You can smell them on each other for miles—“

“Dick and Jason always have scented really strong—“

“Really?” Kon’s head tilted to the side inquisitively as he cut Tim off. “Jason does it, too?”

“Yeah,” Tim nodded his head, settling back down a little bit as his stomach protested to all of the excitement with a fresh wave of pain. “You’ve never been around him when he doesn’t have suppressants in his system, but he’s almost worse than Dick in certain instances.”

“Huh—I didn’t think anybody could get worse than Dick at anything,” Kon pursed his lips contemplatively. “Interesting. But anyway, yeah—there’s definitely something going on there. I don’t think they’ve slept together or bonded, though. Their scents haven’t changed, even if they’re both covered in the other’s.”

“That’s probably why most of us can’t smell it, yet,” Tim hypothesized as he thought back over what he’d seen of his brothers the previous couple of months. It was obvious that the two had been spending more time together, Jason had moved into the Manor eventually to help Dick handle the stress of Bruce being gone, but they’d always been very physical and flirty with each other (at least as long as Tim had been around) so it was hard to judge their relationship on stuff like that. “Or that we don’t realize that we are.”

“Probably,” Kon agreed with a nod of his head, and neither he nor Tim had really realized it, but he’d scooted closer to Tim in his seat during their tangent, and he was leaning the weight of his upper body on to his knees as he looked up at Tim with a relaxed and easy going expression on his face before he remembered what they’d been talking about and his expression schooled itself back into the one he’d been wearing before. “But we can talk about that later. I know that Cassie and Bart died for a little while, too, and I’m guessing there’s a reason I haven’t seen or heard Steph around anywhere, but aside from that and what you just told me about your body, I know nothing.”

“Ah, okay, well—all of that’s true, kind of, but—Bruce didn’t just go away…he died, too, Kon.”

“No—“ Kon gasped as his mouth fell open in pure shock.

“He did,” Tim nodded somberly, looking back down at his hands in his lap as Kon reached forward to grasp one tightly between both of his own.

“Tim—“

“No, it’s okay,” Tim squeezed the hand back, thankful for the anchor, but not nearly as distraught over the subject as he once was. “It was…it was a long time ago, and he’s back now, and that’s all that mattes, but…back then…back then, it was hard. He died—and well actually he didn’t, he was lost in time, but that’s a story for another day—and things around here, especially in Gotham, things were rough for a while, and everything…everything changed. Dick did his best to try to keep an eye out for all of us, but he had to take up the Cowl and Damian…well, Damian was being Damian, and there were a couple of weeks where he and I literally couldn’t be in the same room together without one of us nearly killing the other, and it…it was just, too much. Too many things fell through the cracks and I happened to be one of them. Dick knew something was off—everybody knew something was off—but nobody really had the time or energy to look into it all that much. I was still alive and as far as everybody knew I was still functioning somewhat healthily considering everything that I had been through, so they just…kind of…well, they didn’t ignore it, because that makes it sound like they didn’t care, and they _did_ , it was just…”

“Too much?” Kon offered gruffly, and Tim found himself looking up at him and studying the cobalt blue of his eyes for a couple of seconds before he nodded his head.

“Yeah,” he finally managed to choke out, and forced himself to look away, again. “Once things had calmed down a little bit, and I’d figured out that Bruce wasn’t dead and Jason got Dick to actually listen to me, things eased up and they started looking into it, but in the mean time…Damian was the only person who noticed just how bad it was. He—it didn’t… _start out_ as anywhere near concern, but the less and less I fought him on things and the more and more I just started avoiding him altogether, the more and more…confused he got. Eventually, he started doing research to try to figure out what was going on, and he…he put two and two together—or well, more like he knew the answer was four, but couldn’t figure out the equation to get there—and he confronted me about it, trying to fill in the pieces.”

Tim didn’t realize it, but as he said those last couple of words, his eyes moved to a particularly deep and jagged scar on the underneath side of his left arm, and Kon’s hand tightened around his, as his gaze followed Tim’s.

“Tim,” his voice was low and in that even tone that Tim knew was forced and Tim squeezed his hand back in reassurance.

“It was an accident,” Tim explained quietly. “We were up in one of the hallways in the Manor and we knocked over a vase and I…I fell. Damian thought I was going to get mad or blame him once I got done patching myself up, and rat him out to Dick, but he hesitated when he saw that I wasn’t getting up. My body was pretty strung out at that point from the bond breaking and the loss of my cycle, and the glass lacerated both the radial and the ulnar recurrent, and Damian started panicking when he realized I couldn’t do anything to help myself, and practically drug me down here so he could patch me up and interrogate me about what was going on. Alfred and Dick weren’t home—Dick was out in Blüdhaven checking up on a lead, and Alfred was running errands, so it was just the two of us.”

“Dames would have called Dick, but Dick was so far off his rocker trying to keep everything in one piece, that he was worried about what would have happened if he did—what Dick would have done to me, and what it would have done to Dick himself if he realized how bad I was, and that he’d failed me in trying to help everybody else…so Damian didn’t call. He and Dick had gotten close while Bruce was away because Dick finally gave him a chance to just…be _Damian_ and not the perfect Robin candidate Bruce wanted him to be, or the perfect heir to the Demon’s throne that Talia wanted him to be, and Damian _flourished_. Took it in his stride, and the kid’s not perfect, but he’s good, and he made the right call in not telling Dick. He probably should have called somebody else—J’onn or Diana or even Ollie—but he didn’t know anybody else enough to trust them, still doesn’t really, and eventually he and I made it through on our own.”

“He started asking questions, once he’d gotten enough blood back in me that I could see straight again, and I think he was just doing it because he was genuinely confused and trying to understand, but…it helped me to talk about it. To finally open up and admit to somebody what I was feeling and what I could only guess at the time had happened. It was still too early to know for sure—I had skipped a heat right after my dad passed, so missing another one wasn’t that big of a deal, and three wasn’t really _that_ concerning due to the timing of it, and you were…you were buried, so I couldn’t just call you up and be like, ‘hey, Kon, mind coming over so I can test this little theory I have about accidentally bonding with you when you were off falling in love with your girlfriend?’—but by the time of the…the _incident_ I should have already started into the mid-part of my fourth, and I wasn’t showing any symptoms or signs, and I knew, and there was just so much I’d kept bottled up, that it was nice to unwind.”

“Tim,” Kon said his name again, and Tim looked up at him before he looked away again, running delicate fingers over the side of Kon’s hand to have something to do to center himself as the conversation circled back to where it began.

“I don’t want you to worry about me, though, or feel obligated to—I don’t know… _look after me_ or whatever it is you have in your head that alphas are supposed to do for their omegas, because you don’t have to. I’ve been living with this for years now, even though I didn’t realize just how much it affected my body until you weren’t here anymore, and I’ve got a pretty good handle on myself and I shouldn’t really attack you again like I did yesterday, now that I know you’re back. You didn’t choose this, and you had no idea it was happening, so you couldn’t stop it, and I’m not going to hold that against you, Kon. You’re still my best friend, and this doesn’t have to change anything, but I also understand if you don’t want to be around me anymore—“

“Tim?” Kon tried to interrupt him, but Tim forged on in spite of Kon’s efforts.

“No, Kon, I mean it,” he shook his head, and ignored the mildly annoyed look on Kon’s face. “ _This doesn’t have to change anything for you_. Everything can go back to normal once my hormone levels even out, and you can completely forget that this whole thing happened or that we ever had this conversation. _I don’t expect anything from you_. I can deal—I can cope on my own. You can go back to Cassie and live out your happily ever after or whatever it is that you want with her, and I’ll completely understand if you never want to see me again because of what I’ve done, but I can completely ignore it and stay on hormone suppressants for the rest of my life if you want me to, so you don’t have to deal with it. I’m fine with that. The only reason I came off of them in the first place was because they were too dangerous for me to be on without you around to counteract them. If I’d known you were coming back, I would have had some on me during the battle. But you didn’t let anyone know that you were coming back—at least not that I know of—so I wasn’t prepared. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“…Are you done?” Kon wasn’t harsh when he finally spoke up a couple of breaths after Tim had fallen silent, but there was a way that he was looking down towards their still intertwined hands that Tim didn’t like.

“Yeah,” Tim nodded his head, clamming back up after his many revelations and reluctantly spilled confessions, and he kept his gaze on Kon to really _look_ at him and reveled in the fact that he was alive for the first time since he gotten back, because Tim was terrified he was never going to get another chance to and despite everything he’d just said he was so far head over heels in love with the man that he didn’t think his body could handle him leaving again, let alone what it would do when Kon flat out rejected him in a couple of seconds and—

“You’re right,” Kon nodded his head determinedly after a moment or two of silence, and Tim was torn between relief that Kon was even still talking to him and fear of whatever was about to come out of Kon’s mouth next because Tim knew it wasn’t going to be good. “You won’t make that mistake, again. Neither of us will.”

Tim’s heart shattered with a white-hot pain as Kon said that because he knew what Kon meant, but then, Tim looked up, and suddenly Kon was just _there_ , in Tim’s face and pressing their lips together, and Tim’s brain short circuited as he made a confused noise of protest, and Kon used Tim’s lapse in judgment to slip his tongue into Tim’s mouth, and promptly acquainted himself with one of the few places of Tim’s that he’d never had the chance to explore before.

For a moment—just for a moment—Tim was overwhelmed by the smell and taste of Kon, and he sank into the kiss and fisted his hands up into the zippers of Kon’s sweatshirt without realizing what he was doing, before he came back to reality and pushed Kon away.

“What are you doing?” he furrowed his eyebrows as he looked up at the Kryptonian hunched over top of him—his knees digging into Tim’s right thigh from where he’d crawled up onto the bed beside him.

“You’re not the only one who bonded before I died,” Kon ran his thumbs over the soft skin of Tim’s cheekbones and Tim’s eyebrows drew closer together in confusion for a second because he had no idea why Kon was mentioning his bond with Cassie and using it as an explanation as to why he’d kissed _Tim_ until his eyes widened and his pupils dilated in understanding.

Kon had—Tim wasn’t—he hadn’t—

“ _Oh_ ,” he whispered aloud, unable to tear his eyes away from the ethereal glow Kon’s as he did so.

“Yeah,” Kon looked down, smiling and blushing as he nodded his head. “I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t think you were interested, but…yeah.”

“Oh,” Tim repeated himself, looking away too as he tried to process the full extent of his new knowledge, but before he had a chance to work all of the way through it, Kon’s lips were back on his, and Tim couldn’t find the strength to push him away.

The kisses were slow, hesitant almost, as Tim and Kon went back to tasting each other and sharing breaths as they barely parted more than a couple of centimeters to look up into each other’s eyes, but for all of his nineteen years, Tim couldn’t remember anything else ever feeling so undeniably right.

“Kon?” he whispered against Kon’s lips, pulling back farther than he had since Kon had initiated their second first kiss, and tightened the hold he had on Kon’s hair so that the larger boy knew not to dive right back in for another kiss.

“Yeah?” Kon’s eyes shifted up to his from where Tim wasn’t even sure what he’d been looking at, and Tim could feel his stomach knot and his heart plunge down his toes as he did so.

“I love this, and I love you, I really do,” Tim unknowingly ran his thumb over Kon’s scalp as he spoke. “And if it’s a relationship with me you want, we can talk about that, but I’m not interested in getting marked anytime soon, or running around acting like your ‘omega’ or—“

“You think I don’t know that?” Kon raised an eyebrow down at Tim, with a gleam in his eyes and a smirk on his lips, and Tim had to resist the urge to buck his weight up and spill Kon over on to the floor because doing such a thing would probably tear some of the stitches he would bet that Alfred had sewn into his uterine cavity.

“Well, of the two of us, you _are_ the one of us who’s already in a relationship,” Tim pointed out instead, because as wonderful as fairytales were, Kon’s current relationship status was a huge part of their relationship that they needed to figure out because Tim wasn’t willing to share.

At all.

Ever.

He’d rather go back to having no Kon, than not having Kon all of the time.

“No, I’m not,” Kon’s expression softened into one bordering on the edges of concern, and he shook his head as he reached up to brush some of Tim’s dirty hair back out of his face. “Cassie and I broke up back before I died, and while she seemed to think that it was only a temporary thing—I didn’t. I love Cassie, and she’s great as a friend and all, but romantically speaking, it was just never going to work out for us—not when I had you around to compare all of my feelings with her against—and I didn’t feel right continuing the relationship with her when I knew I would never be able to love her as much as I love you. At least, not when I couldn’t be honest with her about what I was feeling. And I didn’t feel comfortable talking to her about it, because I didn’t know how you felt about the subject, so…”

“So, she doesn’t…?” Tim bit his lip, not sure how to word what he was trying to ask.

“No,” Kon shook his head again, and tugged Tim’s hand up to his lips so he could kiss at the scarred and calloused skin of Tim’s knuckles. “I’m sure she’s had her suspicions—she is one of our best friends, after all—but, no. I’ve never told her.”

“But what about in the clearing, earlier—yesterday?” Tim’s eyebrows furrowed just the tiniest bit, and Tim closed his eyes and leaned up into Kon’s touch as Kon reached up with his free hand to run two of his finger tips over the wrinkles to smooth them back out again. “When she was kissing you and stuff?”

“That, I’m afraid, was Cassie being Cassie,” Kon sighed, and let his hand fall back to the outside of Tim’s thigh between them. “And I promise you that I will be having a conversation with her about it, and that it meant nothing to me, but I didn’t think it was a conversation to have there in front of everyone when she started, and I wasn’t leaving your side after your body decided to pitch itself a fit—or as close to your side as I could get without one of your brothers sending me back to that hell hole I crawled out of—until I knew what was wrong with you and that you were going to be okay. I know the last thirteen months or however long it’s been have been hard for you, and I’m sure if you want to make a Venn-Diagram of all of the things we went through, your side would probably have twice the stuff on it as mine would, but Timothy Jackson Drake, I was away from you for thirteen months, too, and it damn near killed me not being able to talk to you all of that time.”

“I’m sorry,” Tim gave a small little giggle at Kon’s exaggerated tones, and Kon positively beamed for a moment before he swooped down to press their lips together in a couple of kisses that were slightly more demanding than the ones they’d shared previously (not that Tim was complaining).

“As for all of that other stuff,” Kon flapped his free hand through the air when he pulled away again, his lips taking on a mischievous tilt as he did so. “I’ve known you for five years now, Tim—five! Did you really think I was going to walk in here and find out about all of this and expect you to roll over and just give yourself to me regardless of what you wanted?”

Tim didn’t answer him, because he knew it was a rhetorical question, but he did reach out to nip at Kon’s lower lip when Kon leant down for another kiss with a small chuckle, and Kon seemed to take that as an invitation for more as he started pressing kisses all over Tim’s face and head as he went back to talking.

“I know I’m not one of the Bat-Clan, but give me some credit, dude! I’ve been putting up with Cassie for three years! I know you’re not going to be one to play the distressed omega, waiting for me to come home with dinner on the table and our kids in their pajamas ready for bed, and I’m perfectly well aware that if I ever try to so much as look at you the wrong way or control what you do, you’ll have my ass on a platter faster than any of your brothers or Bruce can get to me, and that’s scarier than anything else I think I’ve ever faced.”

Tim had to admit that Kon had a good point—Kon had known him for quite a long time, and as much as everything had been tipped out of balance in the last year or so, not much had changed at all. Tim was no more willing to submit to an alpha than he had been before Kon died, but then again, maybe he trusted Kon enough to be able to look at him as something more than ‘just an alpha’ one day.

“I don’t expect you to lay down and take whatever I give you, and I don’t expect you to throw everything you’ve ever worked for out the door just so you can be around to please me,” Kon’s voice took on a more composed and serious edge as he went on. “Relationships for superheroes are hard—especially for those of us who don’t have entirely human backgrounds—and that’s a reality I accepted a long time ago. You’ve been through a shit ton of stuff over the years, and I know it’s going to take you a long time to get comfortable with this, but I’m not going to force anything on you that you don’t want.”

“You know, you’re not doing a very good job of proving that to me?” Tim huffed out an annoyed little sigh, but his legs fell open as Kon nudged his way down in between them, and he tilted his head to the side so Kon could have better access to the non-scent-gland-ed side of his throat when Kon starting licking and nuzzling at the skin there, not even thinking about what he was doing once as he handed what was effectively his future over to Kon completely.

“I know,” Kon ran his hands soothingly over every part of Tim that he could find. “But I also know that you want this right now, and if you didn’t, you’d be stopping me.”

“That’s true,” Tim conceded with a nod of his head after a moment or so of contemplation, and slipped his hand up under the open space of Kon’s sweatshirt to run it over the skin of Kon’s chest absently as Kon’s nips turned into things more akin to bites.

The two laid like that, Kon hunched over top of Tim as they shared lazy touches back and forth until Tim winced as a hand strayed too close to his pelvis.

“Careful there, Superboy,” Tim chastised him half-teasingly as he squirmed in discomfort. “Part of me is enjoying this and all, and I wish we could take it farther, but my hormone levels are still all over the place, and it still feels like my uterine cavity is trying to eat itself alive.”

“Oh—sorry,” Kon was quick to apologize as he pulled back enough to be able to look down at Tim and quickly removed his hands from Tim’s lower abdomen and legs.

“No—it’s okay—I—“ Tim was in the process of reassuring him that it was okay and readjusting the blankets around his lap just to have something to do, when he looked up at Kon and faltered.

His eyes caught on Kon’s—the iridescent blue that didn’t quite hold the celestial quality that Clark’s did, but still far exceeded that of any earthly blue that Tim had ever seen—and Tim exhaled a silent gasp when he realized that Kon was just as captivated by Tim’s eyes as he was with Kon’s and he finally let it sink in that Kon was back.

Kon was back, and he was Tim’s, and Tim didn’t care about anything else in the world. He just wanted to be Kon’s.

“C’mere,” he found himself whispering (begging— _pleading_ …it didn’t matter—none of that mattered anymore) as soon as he could do more than just stare, and when Kon blinked in confusion Tim clarified what he meant by tangling both of his hands up into Kon’s hair and pulling him back down to his lips in a kiss that was much deeper and much more desperate than either one of them had shared before.

Kon froze for just a fraction of a second, and Tim was thankful for it as Kon repositioned himself overtop of Tim so that his belt buckle wasn’t digging into Tim’s crotch painfully, and propped his weight up on his left arm off to the right side of Tim’s head, so that Tim wasn’t holding him up by his hair, but then he sank into the slow and wet slide of the kiss with a patient eagerness and demand that had Tim’s toes curling, and one of his hands moving from the back of Kon’s neck down to his side to massage and feel at the hard muscle there.

The kiss was everything that Tim had ever wanted, and exactly the thing that he had never been able to read about on the Internet or in books. People everywhere were always so caught up in the fire and flurry of things—the bite and the burning _desperation_ —that they forgot that slow things could be just as tantalizing, and Tim made a vow to himself right then and there in his hospital bed that he would never go more than twenty-fours hours without slowing down enough to actually appreciate Kon and his beautiful body and mind for a couple of minutes (barring Kon being hours away). Tim would have been content to lie there for another couple of hours just kissing Kon slowly and reacquainting himself with all of his favorite of Kon’s being as his body slowly started to heal itself, but then, something shifted beside them and—

“…Does this mean you guys are together now?”

Both Tim and Kon froze as Bart half-stage-whispered beside them, tongues still pressed together as they opened their eyes, before they quickly retracted all of their own body parts back to themselves and wiped at their faces as they turned to look at him.

Tim, at the very least, had forgotten that Bart was there and never in a million years would have started making out with Kon right beside him if he had, but speedster sexuality was a little different than most other humans’ (especially Bart’s, with him being from the future and all—and that was probably why Bruce had allowed him to stay down in the Cave with Tim and Kon in the first place), and Bart seemed mostly unaffected by the intimacy of the situation, and appeared to have no problem lying there beside the two of them as they more or less necked (even if he had curled himself into a tiny little ball and was looking back and forth between Tim and Kon with an expression on his face and a minute vibration in his entire being that barely concealed his excitement at the new possibility and the trepidation at having read the scene wrong).

“Um, well, we haven’t put a label on it,” Kon’s eyes flashed back to Tim’s before he looked away and continued to wipe at his mouth as he blushed. “But—“

“Yeah,” Tim cut him off, turning back to Bart, not wanting the uncertainty to go on any longer than it already had. Bart _had_ just woken up to the two of them making out, after all, and the way Bart’s face lit up and Kon’s blush spread to his neck and his chest made it even better. “We’re together, Bart.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lack of TTK is a side affect of the shot, but it is not permanent! If memory serves me right, I didn’t play around with TTK in Part One, and it might not make an appearance in Part Two because of the course of events, but it is most definitely a thing in the Parts after that!


End file.
